Extracting Synonyms from Bilingual Dictionaries
This work addresses the problem of automatically identifying synonyms, which is important for improving information access applications for researchers and developers working with multilingual data.
This paper introduces an algorithm to extract synonyms from bilingual dictionaries by constructing a translation graph and consolidating cyclic paths. The algorithm achieved an F-Measure of 82.3% for Arabic and 82.1% for English synset extraction when rebuilding synsets from Arabic WordNet.
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.