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.

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Other information

Language

English

Type of outcome

Stať ve sborníku

Field of Study

10201 Computer sciences, information science, bioinformatics

Country of publisher

Czech Republic

Confidentiality degree

není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství

Publication form

electronic version available online

References:

URL

Organization unit

Faculty of Informatics

ISSN

Keywords in English

bilingual dictionaries; (semi)automatic compilation; intermediate language; Estonian; Slovak

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Abstract

V originále

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.