Automatic Methods for the Extension of a Bilingual Dictionary using Comparable Corpora

Bilingual dictionaries define word equivalents from one language to another, thus acting as an important bridge between languages. No bilingual dictionary is complete since languages are in a constant state of change. Additionally, dictionaries are unlikely to achieve complete coverage of all language terms. This paper investigates methods for extending dictionaries using non-aligned corpora, by finding translations through context similarity. Most methods compute word contexts from general corpora. This can lead to errors due to data sparsity. We investigate the hypothesis that this problem can be addressed by carefully choosing smaller corpora in which domain-specific terms are more predominant. We also introduce the notion of efficiency which we consider as the effort required to obtain a set of dictionary entries from a given corpus.