Based on those
two findings, we proposed the idea of a robot capable
of pulling cross-lingual information from those resources and
presenting in a way that is better suited for the needs of
translators. Sounds like you may have just done this!
Well... I hope I did :) The aim was to automatically generate a
multilingual thesaurus, which is surely a good tool for translators.
However, the quality of the results are not what a translator would
expect from a traditional lexicon or thesaurus. The data is probably
most useful directly when used in the context of information retrieval
and language processing, that is, as a basis for computers to link text
to conceptual world knowledge ("common sense"). I hope however that the
data I generate could be usefull to translators anyway, as an addition
or extension to traditional, manually maintained dictionaries and
thesauri. One point that would veryx much interest me is to try to use
my work aqs a basis of building a bridge between Wikipedia and
OmegaWiki.
One of my goals in the next year or two is to participate in the creation of large, open,
wiki-like terminology databases for translators. We call this concept a WikiTerm.
Having observed and interviewed a dozen translators doing their work, I can say without
hesitation that they don't worry too much about upstream quality control in
terminology database. Most of the quality control is done downstream, by the translator
himself. Translators naturally develop a sort of 6th sense that allows them to very
rapidly sift through a list of term equivalents, and decide which one (if any) is most
appropriate for their current need.
One of the conclusions we came to in our paper was that, while OmegaWiki was currently
wiki resource whose coverage of typical translation difficulties was lowest, its user
interface was closest to what translators need. And we suggested that a good way to get to
a WikiTerm would be to do exactly what you propose, i.e. extract write a robot that can
extract cross-lingual information from Wikipedia and Wiktionary, and pour that into
OmegaWiki.
So, let's talk! Do you have contacts at OmegaWiki? If not, I can put you in touch with
them.
Is there a web interface to this multilingual
resource that I could
try?
Sadly, no. I was planning one and started to implement it, but there
was no time to get it up and running. Maybe there will be such an
interface in the future.
But I really see the place of my code more as a backend -- a good
interface to that data may in fact be OmegaWiki, if we find a way to
integrate it nicely. But I do feel the urge to provide a simple query
interface to my data for testing, so maybe it'll still happen :)
Are you planning to do more work on this, or are you moving on to other things?
Have a good weekend.
Alain Désilets