---
title: "Construction of a Bilingual Dictionary Intermediated by a Third Language — Tanaka 1994"
description: "The authors examine how to automatically build a bilingual dictionary for a language pair with few direct resources by going… Cited by 41 papers here."
authors: ["Kumiko Tanaka", "Kyoji Umemura"]
year: 1994
venue: "COLING 1994 (Kyoto)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/C94-1048/"
doi: "10.3115/991886.991937"
arxiv: "cmp-lg/9410020"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tanaka-1994-bilingual-dictionary-third-language/"
---
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# Construction of a Bilingual Dictionary Intermediated by a Third Language

**Authors:** Kumiko Tanaka and Kyoji Umemura · **Year:** 1994 · **Venue:** COLING 1994 (Kyoto) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/C94-1048/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/C94-1048.pdf) · [DOI 10.3115/991886.991937](https://doi.org/10.3115/991886.991937) · [arXiv cmp-lg/9410020](https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9410020)

**Citations:** [41](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tanaka-1994-bilingual-dictionary-third-language/cited-by/) in our library, of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary

The authors examine how to automatically build a bilingual dictionary for a language pair with few direct resources by going through a third, pivot language. They build a Japanese-French dictionary via English. The problem is that English words are polysemous. As a result, the chain Japanese → English → French yields many false equivalents: homonyms (race — "racing" and "race" as in ethnicity), words with a broader meaning (race → hâte), as well as errors in the dictionaries themselves. To filter these out, the authors propose the inverse consultation method. Each French candidate is translated back through the reverse dictionaries. The resulting "selection area" is compared with the source word by counting matches of whole words or of their parts, for example shared kanji. To this end, they formalize a "harmonized" (symmetric) dictionary and introduce weighted multisets. Based on four electronic dictionaries, a word-to-word dictionary of nouns was obtained. The authors checked it against published Japanese-French dictionaries: the method correctly selects equivalents for most entries and finds words missing from those dictionaries. Thus, the approach is suitable for expanding and refining existing bilingual dictionaries.

## Key points

- Source data: Japanese-English (Ichikawa, Kenkyusha, 1990), English-Japanese (Koine, Kenkyusha, 1990), English-French (Forbes, Harrap, 1982) and French-English (Ledésert, Harrap, 1982) dictionaries. The result was checked against published Japanese-French dictionaries.
- The method is called n-fold inverse consultation (IC_n); IC1 and IC2 are analyzed in detail. There are two selection procedures: δa counts matches of whole words, δb counts matches of word parts (kanji, morphemes).
- It is proven that under δa the IC1 and IC2 methods select the same equivalents, and the result is a harmonized dictionary. It suffices to keep candidates with a weight greater than 1.
- δb is needed in cases where δa cannot reject a false candidate, for example when the pivot is a single English word.
- Limitations: only nouns; errors in the source dictionaries are not corrected. Future plans include using a thesaurus and covering other parts of speech and compound words of European languages.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

## Cite

Cite as: Kumiko Tanaka and Kyoji Umemura. 1994. Construction of a Bilingual Dictionary Intermediated by a Third Language. COLING 1994 (Kyoto).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{tanaka1994construction,
  title = {{Construction of a Bilingual Dictionary Intermediated by a Third Language}},
  author = {Kumiko Tanaka and Kyoji Umemura},
  booktitle = {COLING 1994 (Kyoto)},
  year = {1994},
  doi = {10.3115/991886.991937},
  eprint = {cmp-lg/9410020},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/991886.991937}
}
```

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