# Bilingual Lexicon Induction for Low-Resource Languages using Graph Matching via Optimal Transport

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14378 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14378/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Computational Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00567/) (2018)
- [Word Translation Without Parallel Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04087/) (2017)
- [Exploiting Similarities among Languages for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.4168/) (2013)
- [A robust self-learning method for fully unsupervised cross-lingual mappings of word embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06297/) (2018)
- [Gromov-Wasserstein Alignment of Word Embedding Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00013/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Alignment of Embeddings with Wasserstein Procrustes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11222/) (2018)
- [Loss in Translation: Learning Bilingual Word Mapping with a Retrieval Criterion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07745/) (2018)
- [On the Limitations of Unsupervised Bilingual Dictionary Induction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03620/) (2018)
- [How to (Properly) Evaluate Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings: On Strong Baselines, Comparative Analyses, and Some Misconceptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00508/) (2019)
- [FRAGE: Frequency-Agnostic Word Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06858/) (2018)
- [When Does Unsupervised Machine Translation Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05516/) (2020)
- [An Effective Approach to Unsupervised Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01313/) (2019)
- [Are All Good Word Vector Spaces Isomorphic?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04070/) (2020)
- [A Call for More Rigor in Unsupervised Cross-lingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14958/) (2020)
- [Bilingual Lexicon Induction with Semi-supervision in Non-Isometric Embedding Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06625/) (2019)
- [Do We Really Need Fully Unsupervised Cross-Lingual Embeddings?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01638/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of a Pretrained Cross-Lingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11499/) (2020)
- [Analyzing the Limitations of Cross-lingual Word Embedding Mappings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05407/) (2019)
- [Bilingual Lexicon Induction via Unsupervised Bitext Construction and Word Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00148/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Hyperalignment for Multilingual Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01124/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Transfer of Word Embedding Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03633/) (2018)
- [Bilingual Lexicon Induction through Unsupervised Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10761/) (2019)
- [GraSPy: Graph Statistics in Python](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05329/) (2019)
- [Are Girls Neko or Sh=ojo? Cross-Lingual Alignment of Non-Isomorphic Embeddings with Iterative Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01622/) (2019)
- [Don't Forget the Long Tail! A Comprehensive Analysis of Morphological Generalization in Bilingual Lexicon Induction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02855/) (2019)
- [Improving Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings by Meeting in the Middle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08780/) (2018)
- [A Discriminative Latent-Variable Model for Bilingual Lexicon Induction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09334/) (2018)
- [A Relaxed Matching Procedure for Unsupervised BLI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07095/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [The Zeno's Paradox of `Low-Resource' Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20817/) (2024)
- [Optimal Transport Posterior Alignment for Cross-lingual Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04096/) (2023)
- [ProMap: Effective Bilingual Lexicon Induction via Language Model Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18778/) (2023)
- [Accessing Higher Dimensions for Unsupervised Word Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14200/) (2023)
- [A survey of neural-network-based methods utilising comparable data for finding translation equivalents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15144/) (2024)
- [Asymptotically perfect seeded graph matching without edge correlation (and applications to inference)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02825/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bilingual lexicons form a critical component of various natural language processing applications, including unsupervised and semisupervised machine translation and crosslingual information retrieval. We improve bilingual lexicon induction performance across 40 language pairs with a graph-matching method based on optimal transport. The method is especially strong with low amounts of supervision.