Plan Optimization for Creating Bilingual Dictionaries of Low-Resource Languages

Abstract

The constraint-based approach has been proven useful for inducing bilingual lexicons for closely-related low-resource languages. When we want to create multiple bilingual dictionaries linking several languages, we need to consider manual creation by bilingual language experts if there are no available machine-readable dictionaries are available as input. To overcome the difficulty in planning the creation of bilingual dictionaries, the consideration of various methods and costs, plan optimization is essential. We adopt the Markov Decision Process (MDP) in formalizing plan optimization for creating bilingual dictionaries; the goal is to better predict the most feasible optimal plan with the least total cost before fully implementing the constraint-based bilingual dictionary induction framework. We define heuristics based on input language characteristics to devise a baseline plan for evaluating our MDP-based approach with total cost as an evaluation metric. The MDP-based proposal outperformed heuristic planning on total cost for all datasets examined.