Inferring translation candidates for multilingual dictionary generation with multi-way neural machine translation

In the widely-connected digital world, multilingual lexical resources are one of the most important resources, for natural language processing applications, including information retrieval, question answering or knowledge management. These applications benefit from the multilingual knowledge as well as from the semantic relation between the words documented in these resources. Since multilingual dictionary creation and curation is a time-consuming task, we explored the use of multi-way neural machine translation trained on corpora of languages from the same family and trained additionally with a relatively small human-validated dictionary to infer new translation candidates. Our results showed not only that new dictionary entries can be identified and extracted from the translation model, but also that the expected precision and recall of the resulting dictionary can be adjusted by using different thresholds.This publication has emanated from research supported in part by a research grant from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under Grant Number SFI/12/RC/2289, co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 731015, ELEXIS - European Lexical Infrastructure.2019-05-2