BUILDING A TRANSLATION LEXICON FROM COMPARABLE, NON-PARALLEL CORPORA

A machine translation system may use non-parallel monolingual corpora to generate a translation lexicon. The system may identify identically spelled words in the two corpora, and use them as a seed lexicon. The system may use various clues, e.g., context and frequency, to identify and score other possible translation pairs, using the seed lexicon as a basis. An alternative system may use a small bilingual lexicon in addition to non-parallel corpora to learn translations of unknown words and to generate a parallel corpus.