What Types of Translations Hide in Wikipedia?

摘要

We extend an automatically generated bilingual Japanese-Swedish dictionary with new translations, automatically discovered from the multi-lingual online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Over 50,000 translations, most of which are not present in the original dictionary, are generated, with very high translation quality. We analyze what types of translations can be generated by this simple method. The majority of the words are proper nouns, and other types of (usually) uninteresting translations are also generated. Not counting the less interesting words, about 15,000 new translations are still found. Checking against logs of search queries from the old dictionary shows that the new translations would significantly reduce the number of searches with no matching translation.