Shooting at Flies in the Dark: Rule-Based Lexical Selection for a Minority Language Pair

This paper presents a set of rules which form the prototype lexical selection component of a rule-based machine translation system between two closely-related minority languages, North Sámi and Lule Sámi. While the languages have comprehensive monolingual computational linguistic resources, they lack bilingual resources. One-to-one relations in the lexicon dominate, but there are also more complex relations that require lexical selection using both lexical and syntacticosemantic context. An evaluation was performed over a set of 11 word pairs, which shows that constructing lexical selection rules and doing research on a North Sámi–Lule Sámi contrastive lexicon is an interrelated process. Other lesser-resourced language pairs will benefit from the use of lexical selection rules as the relevance of lexical selection increases with the divergence of the languages.