Abstract

Accurately translating multiword expressions is important to obtain good performance in machine translation, crosslanguage information retrieval, and other multilingual tasks in human language technology. Existing approaches to inducing translation equivalents of multiword units have focused on agglomerating individual words or on aligning words in a statistical machine translation system. We present a different approach based upon information theoretic heuristics and the exact counting of frequencies of occurrence of multiword strings in aligned parallel corpora. We are applying a technique introduced by Yamamoto and Church that uses suffix arrays and longest common prefix arrays. Evaluation of the method in multiple language pairs was performed using bilingual lexicons of domainspecific terminology as a gold standard. We found that performance of 50-70%, as measured by mean reciprocal rank, can be obtained for terms that occur more than 10 or so times. 1

Citations