Automatic Creation Of N-lingual Synonymous Word Sets

Multilingual dictionaries are very useful in machine translations and natural lan-guage processing. However, a multilingual dictionary including all natural languagesstill does not exist. In this paper we propose three trustworthy methods to auto-matically create multilingual dictionary represented by N-lingual synonymous wordsets (N-tuples, hereafter). Based on the work of 3-lingual synonymous word sets,our method has extended 3-lingual to n-lingual synonymous word sets from multiplebilingual dictionaries. By matching and combining the triples instead of the binaryrelations in the bilingual dictionaries, the complexity of the problem is significantlyreduced. Using these methods, we created 4-lingual synonymous word sets amongChinese, Japanese, English and German. The evaluations indicate that our combin-ing algorithm has effectively solved the error accumulation problem and achieved avery promising quality. In the example application, the 4-tuples are used to refine thetranslation quality of a multi-hop machine translator created on the Language Grid. Itshows that utilizing the handy online services and uniform platform in research workis a good methodology.