Extracting Synonyms from Bilingual Dictionaries

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new algorithm for extracting bilingual synonyms from dictionaries, demonstrating promising results in Arabic-English synonym extraction with high accuracy.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel translation graph-based algorithm for extracting bilingual synonyms, improving upon previous methods in accuracy and effectiveness.

Findings

Achieved an F-Measure of over 82% in Arabic-English synonym extraction.

Successfully reconstructed synsets from Arabic WordNet using the algorithm.

Demonstrated the potential of cyclic path analysis in bilingual synonym discovery.

Abstract

We present our progress in developing a novel algorithm to extract synonyms from bilingual dictionaries. Identification and usage of synonyms play a significant role in improving the performance of information access applications. The idea is to construct a translation graph from translation pairs, then to extract and consolidate cyclic paths to form bilingual sets of synonyms. The initial evaluation of this algorithm illustrates promising results in extracting Arabic-English bilingual synonyms. In the evaluation, we first converted the synsets in the Arabic WordNet into translation pairs (i.e., losing word-sense memberships). Next, we applied our algorithm to rebuild these synsets. We compared the original and extracted synsets obtaining an F-Measure of 82.3% and 82.1% for Arabic and English synsets extraction, respectively.