Compiling an Estonian-Slovak Dictionary with English as a Binder

DENISOVÁ, Michaela. Compiling an Estonian-Slovak Dictionary with English as a Binder. Online. In Proceedings of Electronic Lexicography in the 21st Century Conference (7th Biennial Conference on Electronic Lexicography, eLex 2021). Brno: Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o., 2021, p. 107-120. ISSN 2533-5626.

Basic information

• Original name: Compiling an Estonian-Slovak Dictionary with English as a Binder
• Authors: DENISOVÁ, Michaela (703 Slovakia, guarantor, belonging to the institution).
• Edition: Brno, Proceedings of Electronic Lexicography in the 21st Century Conference (7th Biennial Conference on Electronic Lexicography, eLex 2021), p. 107-120, 14 pp. 2021.
• Publisher: Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o.

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Proceedings paper
• Field of Study: 10201 Computer sciences, information science, bioinformatics
• Country of publisher: Czech Republic
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• Publication form: electronic version available online
• WWW: URL
• Organization unit: Faculty of Informatics
• ISSN: 2533-5626
• Keywords in English: bilingual dictionaries; (semi)automatic compilation; intermediate language; Estonian; Slovak

Abstract

For such a rare language combination as Estonian-Slovak, it is complicated to find study materials designated for Slovaks learning Estonian, especially a bilingual dictionary, an essential language study resource. However, building a bilingual dictionary from scratch requires a lot of work and effort. The half-automatic computational methods and vailable open-source language resources offer a possible solution for this complicated task. One approach is to merge two already existing dictionaries that share a common language to derive a new language pair dictionary. However, as words are polysemous, many mistakes could occur while attempting so. Therefore, it is required to edit the aligned translations afterwards. This article describes the process of compiling the Estonian-Slovak dictionary created from English-Estonian and English-Slovak dictionaries. English was chosen as an intermediate language, as it is a well-resourced language, and all materials are easy to find. Various automatic techniques were applied in the editing step to decrease the number of incorrectly aligned translations. Finally, the techniques used and quality of the dictionary were manually evaluated on a random sample of 1,000 translations. The final version of the dictionary consists of 138,779 translations, and the Estonian headword list covers about 85% of basic Estonian vocabulary, which contains around 5,000 lemmas. The correct translations form approximately 40% of the dictionary. Additionally, a web application is being developed for this dictionary.