Japanese-Spanish Thesaurus Construction Using English as a Pivot

We present the results of research with the goal of automatically creating a multilingual thesaurus based on the freely available resources of Wikipedia and WordNet. Our goal is to increase resources for natural language processing tasks such as machine translation targeting the Japanese-Spanish language pair. Given the scarcity of resources, we use existing English resources as a pivot for creating a trilingual Japanese-Spanish-English thesaurus. Our approach consists of extracting the translation tuples from Wikipedia, disambiguating them by mapping them to WordNet word senses. We present results comparing two methods of disambiguation, the first using VSM on Wikipedia article texts and WordNet definitions, and the second using categorical information extracted from Wikipedia, We find that mixing the two methods produces favorable results. Using the proposed method, we have constructed a multilingual Spanish-Japanese-English thesaurus consisting of 25,375 entries. The same method can be applied to any pair of languages that are linked to English in Wikipedia.