Acquisition of Translation Lexicons for Historically Unwritten Languages via Bridging Loanwords
This addresses the challenge of resource scarcity for unwritten languages in digital communication, though it is incremental as it builds on existing loanword and bridging techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of creating translation lexicons for historically unwritten languages by using bridging loanwords, such as from French to English for Moroccan Darija, and finds that this method induces a useful lexicon for human-assisted and statistical machine translation.
With the advent of informal electronic communications such as social media, colloquial languages that were historically unwritten are being written for the first time in heavily code-switched environments. We present a method for inducing portions of translation lexicons through the use of expert knowledge in these settings where there are approximately zero resources available other than a language informant, potentially not even large amounts of monolingual data. We investigate inducing a Moroccan Darija-English translation lexicon via French loanwords bridging into English and find that a useful lexicon is induced for human-assisted translation and statistical machine translation.