Media of Langue: The Interface for Exploring Word Translation Network/Space

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Word Translation Network, a large interconnected graph of words across languages, and presents Media of Langue, an interactive web interface for exploring semantic relationships and translation patterns among multiple languages.

Contribution

It defines and constructs the Word Translation Network from bilingual corpora and develops Media of Langue, a novel interface for exploring multilingual semantic configurations.

Findings

The Word Translation Network reveals structural properties of cross-lingual translation relationships.

Media of Langue effectively visualizes semantic configurations across multiple languages.

The interface provides new insights into bilingual and multilingual dictionary structures.

Abstract

In the human activity of word translation, two languages face each other, mutually searching their own language system for the semantic place of words in the other language. We discover the huge network formed by the chain of these mutual translations as Word Translation Network, a network where words are nodes, and translation volume is represented as edges, and propose Media of Langue, a novel interface for exploring this network. Media of Langue points to the semantic configurations of many words in multiple languages at once, containing the information of existing dictionaries such as bilingual and synonym dictionaries. We have also implemented and published this interface as a web application, focusing on seven language pairs. This paper first defines the Word Translation Network and describes how to actually construct the network from bilingual corpora, followed by an analysis of the properties of the network. Next, we explain how to design a Media of Langue using the Word Translation Network, and finally, we analyze the features of the Media of Langue as a dictionary. Our website is https://www.media-of-langue.org .