Abstract
Most methods to extract bilingual lexicons from parallel corpora learn word correspondences using relative small aligned segments, called sentences. Then, they need to get a corpus aligned at the sentence level. Such an alignment can require further manual corrections if the parallel corpus contains insertions, deletions, or fuzzy sentence boundaries. This paper shows that it is possible to extract bilingual lexicons without aligning parallel texts at the sentence level. We describe a method to learn word translations from a very roughly aligned corpus, namely a corpus with quite long segments separated by “natural boundaries”. The results obtained using this method are very close to those obtained using sentence alignment. Some experiments were performed on English-Portuguese and English-Spanish parallel texts.
This work has been supported by Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia of Spain, within the projects CESAR+ and GaricoTerm, ref: BFF2003-02866.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Ahrenberg, L., Andersson, M., Merkel, M.: A simple hybrid aligner for generating lexical correspondences in parallel texts. In: 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-ACL 1998), Montreal, pp. 29–35 (1998)
Brown, P.F., Lai, J., Mercer, R.: Aligning sentences in parallel corpora. In: 29th Conference of ACL (1991)
Church, K.: Char_align: A program for aligning parallel texts at the character level. In: 31st Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Columbus, Ohio, pp. 1–8 (1993)
Fung, P., McKeown, K.: Finding terminology translation frmo nonparallel corpora. In: 5th Annual Workshop on Very Large Corpora, Hong Kong, pp. 192–202 (1997)
Gale, W., Church, K.: Identifying word correspondences in parallel texts. In: Workshop DARPA SNL (1991)
Gamallo, P.: Extraction of translation equivalents from parallel corpora using sense-sensitive contexts. In: 10th Conference of the European Association on Machine Translation (EAMT 2005), Budapest, Hungary, pp. 97–102 (2005)
Koehn, P.: Europarl: A multilingual corpus for evaluation of machine translation (2003), http://people.csail.mit.edu/koehn/publications/europarl/
Kwong, O.Y., Tsou, B.K., Lai, T.B.: Alignment and extraction of bilingual legal terminology from context profiles. Terminology 10(1), 81–99 (2004)
Melamed, D.: A word-to-word model of translational equivalence. In: 35th Conference of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 1997), Madrid, Spain (1997)
Melamed, D.: Bitext maps and alignment via pattern recognition. Computational Linguistics 25(1) (1999)
Ribeiro, A., Dias, G., Lopes, G., Mexia, J.: Cognates alignment. In: Machine Translation Summit VIII, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, pp. 287–293 (2001)
Ribeiro, A., Lopes, G., Mexia, J.: Using confidence bands for parallel texts alignment. In: 38th Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 432–439 (2000)
Simard, M., Plamondon, P.: Bilingual sentence alignment: Balancing robustness and accuracy. Machine Translation 13(1), 59–80 (1998)
Smadja, F., McKeown, K., Hatzivassiloglou, V.: Translating collocations for bilingual lexicons. Computational Linguistics 22(1) (1996)
Tiedemann, J.: Extraction of translation equivalents from parallel corpora. In: 11th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics, Copenhagen, Denmark (1998)
Vintar, Ŝ.: Using parallel corpora for translation-oriented term extraction. Babel Journal 47(2), 121–132 (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Otero, P.G. (2006). Using Natural Alignment to Extract Translation Equivalents. In: Vieira, R., Quaresma, P., Nunes, M.d.G.V., Mamede, N.J., Oliveira, C., Dias, M.C. (eds) Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3960. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11751984_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11751984_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-34045-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-34046-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)