Enriching Multilingual Language Resources by Discovering Missing Cross-Language Links in Wikipedia

We present a novel method for discovering missing cross-language links between English and Japanese Wikipedia articles. We collect candidates of missing cross-language links -- a pair of English and Japanese Wikipedia articles, which could be connected by cross-language links. Then we select the correct cross-language links among the candidates by using a classifier trained with various types of features. Our method has three desirable characteristics for discovering missing links. First, our method can discover cross-language links with high accuracy (92\% precision with 78\% recall rates). Second, the features used in a classifier are language-independent. Third, without relying on any external knowledge, we generate the features based on resources automatically obtained from Wikipedia. In this work, we discover approximately $10^5$ missing cross-language links from Wikipedia, which are almost two-thirds as many as the existing cross-language links in Wikipedia.

1 Introduction

Wikipedia is an open and multilingual encyclopedia that provides a huge amount of articles created everyday. Multilingual versions of Wikipedia articles can be recognized via so-called cross-language or inter-language links, which connect articles in one language to their corresponding articles in another languages. Obviously, these links are useful for cross-language natural language applications including machine translation and cross-lingual information retrieval, because they can provide a valuable multilingual language resource including bilingual sentence pairs [1], multilingual text collection for an information access task [6], and a bilingual dictionary [3].