Creating multilingual translation lexicons with regional variations using web corpora

The purpose of this paper is to automatically create multilingual translation lexicons with regional variations. We propose a transitive translation approach to determine translation variations across languages that have insufficient corpora for translation via the mining of bilingual search-result pages and clues of geographic information obtained from Web search engines. The experimental results have shown the feasibility of the proposed approach in efficiently generating translation equivalents of various terms not covered by general translation dictionaries. It also revealed that the created translation lexicons can reflect different cultural aspects across regions such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China.