UBA: Using automatic translation and Wikipedia for cross-lingual lexical substitution

  • Authors:

  • Pierpaolo Basile;Giovanni Semeraro

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Bari "Aldo Moro", Bari (ITALY);University of Bari "Aldo Moro", Bari (ITALY)

  • Venue:
  • SemEval '10 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

This paper presents the participation of the University of Bari (UBA) at the SemEval-2010 Cross-Lingual Lexical Substitution Task. The goal of the task is to substitute a word in a language Ls, which occurs in a particular context, by providing the best synonyms in a different language Lt which fit in that context. This task has a strict relation with the task of automatic machine translation, but there are some differences: Cross-lingual lexical substitution targets one word at a time and the main goal is to find as many good translations as possible for the given target word. Moreover, there are some connections with Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) algorithms. Indeed, understanding the meaning of the target word is necessary to find the best substitutions. An important aspect of this kind of task is the possibility of finding synonyms without using a particular sense inventory or a specific parallel corpus, thus allowing the participation of unsupervised approaches. UBA proposes two systems: the former is based on an automatic translation system which exploits Google Translator, the latter is based on a parallel corpus approach which relies on Wikipedia in order to find the best substitutions.