Data-driven Amharic-English Bilingual Lexicon Acquisition

This paper describes a simple approach of statistical language modelling for bilingual lexicon acquisition from Amharic-English parallel corpora. The goal is to induce a seed translation lexicon from sentence-aligned corpora. The seed translation lexicon contains matches of Amharic lexemes to weekly inflected English words. Purely statistical measures of term distribution are used as the basis for finding correlations between terms. An authentic scoring scheme is codified based on distributional properties of words. For low frequency terms a two step procedure of: first a rough alignment; and then an automatic filtering to sift the output and improve the precision is made. Given the disparity of the languages and the small size of corpora used the results demonstrate the viability of the approach.