Translation-based Lexicalization Generation and Lexical Gap Detection: Application to Kinship Terms

Senyu Li, Bradley Hauer, Ning Shi, Grzegorz Kondrak


Abstract
Constructing lexicons with explicitly identified lexical gaps is a vital part of building multilingual lexical resources. Prior work has leveraged bilingual dictionaries and linguistic typologies for semi-automatic identification of lexical gaps. Instead, we propose a generally-applicable algorithmic method to automatically generate concept lexicalizations, which is based on machine translation and hypernymy relations between concepts. The absence of a lexicalization implies a lexical gap. We apply our method to kinship terms, which make a suitable case study because of their explicit definitions and regular structure. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our approach yields higher accuracy than BabelNet and ChatGPT. Our error analysis indicates that enhancing the quality of translations can further improve the accuracy of our method.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.372
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6891–6900
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.372
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.372
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Senyu Li, Bradley Hauer, Ning Shi, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2024. Translation-based Lexicalization Generation and Lexical Gap Detection: Application to Kinship Terms. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6891–6900, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Translation-based Lexicalization Generation and Lexical Gap Detection: Application to Kinship Terms (Li et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.372.pdf