Measuring Chinese-English Cross-Lingual Word Similarity with HowNet and Parallel Corpus

Cross-lingual word similarity (CLWS) is a basic component in cross-lingual information access systems. Designing a CLWS measure faces three challenges: (i) Cross-lingual knowledge base is rare; (ii) Cross-lingual corpora are limited; and (iii) No benchmark cross-lingual dataset is available for CLWS evaluation. This paper presents some Chinese-English CLWS measures that adopt HowNet as cross-lingual knowledge base and sentence-level parallel corpus as development data. In order to evaluate these measures, a Chinese-English cross-lingual benchmark dataset is compiled based on the Miller-Charles' dataset. Two conclusions are drawn from the experimental results. Firstly, HowNet is a promising knowledge base for the CLWS measure. Secondly. parallel corpus is promising to fine-tune the word similarity measures usine cross-lingual co-occurrence statistics.