Known Words Will Do: Unknown Concept Translation via Lexical Relations

AbstractTranslating into low-resource languages is challenging due to the scarcity of training data. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic lexical translation method that bridges through lexical relations including synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, and co-hyponyms. This method, which only requires a dictionary like Wiktionary and a lexical database like WordNet, enables the translation of unknown vocabulary into low-resource languages for which we may only know the translation of a related concept. Experiments on translating a core vocabulary set into 472 languages, most of them low-resource, show the effectiveness of our approach.