User:Francis Tyers/Sandbox

Lexical selection

Information

• Surface form -- tud etc.
• Lemma -- den etc.
• Category -- n.f etc.
• Syntax -- @SUBJ etc.

Ideas

Inferring rules from collocations

• The bilingual dictionary has several translations for each ambiguous word.
• Rules are created to select between them based on context.
• For each word in the bilingual dictionary, collocations (n-grams) are extracted from a source language corpus.
  • reisa þetta hús og fullgjöra
  • reisa þetta hús og fullgjöra
  • niður þetta hús Guðs í
  • gjört fyrir hús Guðs himnanna
  • inn í hús Semaja Delajasonar
• For each ambiguous word, these collocations are run with each of the entries in the bilingual dictionary through the translator.
• Translations are scored on a target language corpus.
• Where the difference in score between one translation and another reaches a threshold, a rule is created in the form of:
  • MAP (sense1) ("hús") IF (1 ("Guðs"));
• Syntax could also be included.
  • MAP (sense1) ("hús") IF (1 @SUBJ);

Advantages

• Fairly straightforward -- the rules can be created automatically in constraint grammar.
• Human readable / editable.
• Doesn't require parallel corpus -- although might work better with one.
• Unsupervised.

Disadvantages

• Many rules will be slow.
• Might not work very well.

Relevant prior work

• Jin Yang (1999) "Towards the Automatic Acquisition of Lexical Selection Rules"