In developing a machine translation system, one of the difficult tasks is how to build a transfer dictionary. It has been built by human labor from scratch in most cases, but it is very ineffective from the viewpoint of cost and time. To avoid this problem, we generate a Korean to Japanese dictionary, taking advantage of existing linguistic resources, which is a Japanese to English dictionary and a Korean to English dictionary for the present goal. First, we extract some sets of English words corresponding to Korean words from a Korean to English dictionary. Second, we search for Japanese words having English equivalents which are similar to Korean counterparts in meaning. Finally, we link the Korean words to Japanese ones. The degree of similarity is determined according to how many translated words are shared between Korean and Japanese. We test 1,000 Korean words extracted at random and get 365 appropriate Japanese words. The result shows 72% are accurate for degree of similarity 0.8 and above.
bilingual dictionary, dictionary generation, intermediate language, similarity of translation