Automatic generation of English/Chinese thesaurus based on a parallel corpus in laws

Abstract

The information available in languages other than English in the World Wide Web is increasing significantly. According to a report from Computer Economics in 1999, 54% of Internet users are English speakers (“English Will Dominate Web for Only Three More Years,” Computer Economics, July 9, 1999, http://www.computereconomics.com/new4/pr/pr990610.html). However, it is predicted that there will be only 60% increase in Internet users among English speakers verses a 150% growth among non‐English speakers for the next five years. By 2005, 57% of Internet users will be non‐English speakers. A report by CNN.com in 2000 showed that the number of Internet users in China had been increased from 8.9 million to 16.9 million from January to June in 2000 (“Report: China Internet users double to 17 million,” CNN.com, July, 2000, http://cnn.org/2000/TECH/computing/07/27/china.internet.reut/index.html). According to Nielsen/NetRatings, there was a dramatic leap from 22.5 millions to 56.6 millions Internet users from 2001 to 2002. China had become the second largest global at‐home Internet population in 2002 (US's Internet population was 166 millions) (Robyn Greenspan, “China Pulls Ahead of Japan,” Internet.com, April 22, 2002, http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/geographics/article/0,,5911_1013841,00.html). All of the evidences reveal the importance of cross‐lingual research to satisfy the needs in the near future. Digital library research has been focusing in structural and semantic interoperability in the past. Searching and retrieving objects across variations in protocols, formats and disciplines are widely explored (Schatz, B., & Chen, H. (1999). Digital libraries: technological advances and social impacts. IEEE Computer, Special Issue on Digital Libraries, February, 32(2), 45–50.; Chen, H., Yen, J., & Yang, C.C. (1999). International activities: development of Asian digital libraries. IEEE Computer, Special Issue on Digital Libraries, 32(2), 48–49.). However, research in crossing language boundaries, especially across European languages and Oriental languages, is still in the initial stage. In this proposal, we put our focus on cross‐lingual semantic interoperability by developing automatic generation of a cross‐lingual thesaurus based on English/Chinese parallel corpus. When the searchers encounter retrieval problems, professional librarians usually consult the thesaurus to identify other relevant vocabularies. In the problem of searching across language boundaries, a cross‐lingual thesaurus, which is generated by co‐occurrence analysis and Hopfield network, can be used to generate additional semantically relevant terms that cannot be obtained from dictionary. In particular, the automatically generated cross‐lingual thesaurus is able to capture the unknown words that do not exist in a dictionary, such as names of persons, organizations, and events. Due to Hong Kong's unique history background, both English and Chinese are used as official languages in all legal documents. Therefore, English/Chinese cross‐lin...

Thésaurus et systèmes de traitement automatique de la langue

“…Ensuite, il y a un intérêt théorique à vérifier des hypothèses quant aux connaissances implicites encodées dans des textes ou des dictionnaires. On trouve bon nombre d'écrits sur le sujet, dont un nombre important sur le chinois (pour n'en nommer que quelques-uns: Foo et al, 2000;Tseng, 2002;Yang et Luk, 2003).…”

Exploiting the Web as the multilingual corpus for unknown query translation

“…Yang and Li (2003) tried to construct English-Chinese parallel corpora from the Web sites with monolingual subtree structure. Then, the parallel corpora could be used in automatic generation of English-Chinese thesaurus (Yang & Luk, 2003) as a promising tool for cross-lingual information retrieval. Some work has been done on term translation extraction from comparable texts, such as bilingual newspapers (Fung & Yee, 1998), which are easier to obtain.…”

The Use of Knowledge Map Model in Construction Industry

“…Knowledge Map can display employees' ability in an organization and their distribution of practical job experience. Moreover, it also can establish connections among documents (Srinivasan 1996;Xu and Ibrahim 2004;Yang and Luk 2003), increase teaching efficiency (O'Donnell 1993(O'Donnell , 1994, help users to find out information in database more easily (Pyo 2005) and facilitate knowledge transfer (Meziane and Rezgui 2004). The potential application of a Knowledge Map is extensive, including law (Yang and Luk 2003), medical science (Srinivasan 1996), education (Lee and Tserng 2006;O'Donnell 1993O'Donnell , 1994, travel industry (Pyo 2005), information engineering (Yang and Luk 2003) and even civil engineering Tserng 2004, 2006;Lin 2008;Tserng et al 2009).…”

“…Only few specific industries have their particular Knowledge Map, for instance law (Yang and Luk 2003), medical science (Srinivasan 1996) and travel industry (Pyo 2005). There are many issues about KM, which been explored and discussed in related literature in construction industry.…”