Bootstrapping Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction

Abstract

The task of unsupervised lexicon induction is to find translation pairs across monolingual corpora. We develop a novel method that creates seed lexicons by identifying cognates in the vocabularies of related languages on the basis of their frequency and lexical similarity. We apply bidirectional bootstrapping to a method which learns a linear mapping between context-based vector spaces. Experimental results on three language pairs show consistent improvement over prior work.