Design and construction of a machine-tractable Japanese-Malay dictionary

Abstract

We present a method for combining two bilingual dictionaries to make a third, using one language as a pivot. In this case we

combine a Japanese-English dictionary with a Malay-English dictionary, to produce a Japanese-Malay dictionary suitable

for use in a machine translation system. Our method differs from previous methods in its use of semantic classes to rank

translation equivalents: word pairs with compatible semantic classes are preferred to those with dissimilar classes. We also

experiment with the use of two pivot languages. We have made a prototype dictionary of over 75,000 pairs.