Parallel Translations As Sense Discriminators

This article reports the results of a p r e hmlna ry analysis of translation equivalents in four languages from different language famdles, extracted from an on-hne parallel corpus of George Orwell's Nmeteen Eighty-Four The goal of the study is to determine the degree to which translatmn equivalents for different meamngs of a polysemous word In Enghsh are lexlcahzed differently across a variety of languages, and to detelmme whether this information can be used to structure or create a set of sense distinctions useful in natural language processing apphcatmns A coherence Index is computed that measures the tendency for different senses o1 the same English word to be lexlcahzed differently, and flora this data a clustering algorithm is used to create sense hierat chles