Massively Translingual Compound Analysis and Translation Discovery

Abstract

Word formation via compounding is a very widely observed but quite diverse phenomenon across the world’s languages, but the compositional semantics of a compound are often productively correlated between even distant languages. Using only freely available bilingual dictionaries and no annotated training data, we derive novel models for analyzing compound words and effectively generate novel foreign-language translations of English concepts using these models. In addition, we release a massively multilingual dataset of compound words along with their decompositions, covering over 21,000 instances in 329 languages, a previously unprecedented scale which should both productively support machine translation (especially in low resource languages) and also facilitate researchers in their further analysis and modeling of compounds and compound processes across the world’s languages