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Termight: Coordinating Humans and Machines in Bilingual Terminology Acquisition

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Machine Translation

Abstract

We propose a semi-automatic tool, termight, that supports the construction of bilingual glossaries. Termight consists of two components which address the two subtasks in glossary construction: (a) preparing a monolingual list of all technical terms in a source-language document, and (b) finding the translations for these terms in parallel source–target documents. As a first step (in each component) the tool extracts automatically candidate terms and candidate translations, based on term-extraction and word-alignment algorithms. It then performs several additional preprocessing steps which greatly facilitate human post-editing of the candidate lists. These steps include grouping and sorting of candidates and associating example concordance lines with each candidate. Finally, the data prepared in preprocessing is presented to the user via an interactive interface which supports quick post-editing operations. Termight was deployed by translators at AT & T Business Translation Services (formerly AT & T Language Line Services) leading to very high rates of semi-automatic glossary construction.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, 52900, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Ido Dagan

  2. AT & T Research, 600 Mountain Ave., Murray Hill, NJ, 07974, U.S.A.

    Ken Church

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  1. Ido Dagan
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  2. Ken Church
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Dagan, I., Church, K. Termight: Coordinating Humans and Machines in Bilingual Terminology Acquisition. Machine Translation 12, 89–107 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007926723945

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