Cognate Mapping - A Heuristic Strategy for the Semi-Supervised Acquisition of a Spanish Lexicon from a Portuguese Seed Lexicon

We deal with the automated acquisition of a Spanish medical subword lexicon from an already existing Portuguese seed lexicon. Using two non-parallel monolingual corpora we determined Spanish lexeme candidates from Portuguese seed lexicon entries by heuristic cognate mapping. We validated the emergent lexical translation hypotheses by determining the similarity of fixed-window context vectors on the basis of Portuguese and Spanish text corpora.