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Extraction of multi-word expressions from small parallel corpora

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2012

YULIA TSVETKOV  and
SHULY WINTNER
YULIA TSVETKOV
Affiliation:
Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: yulia.tsvetkov@gmail.com
SHULY WINTNER
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science University of Haifa, Hafia, Israel e-mail: shuly@cs.haifa.ac.il
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Abstract

We present a general, novel methodology for extracting multi-word expressions (MWEs) of various types, along with their translations, from small, word-aligned parallel corpora. Unlike existing approaches, we focus on misalignments; these typically indicate expressions in the source language that are translated to the target in a non-compositional way. We introduce a simple algorithm that proposes MWE candidates based on such misalignments, relying on 1:1 alignments as anchors that delimit the search space. We use a large monolingual corpus to rank and filter these candidates. Evaluation of the quality of the extraction algorithm reveals significant improvements over naïve alignment-based methods. The extracted MWEs, with their translations, are used in the training of a statistical machine translation system, showing a small but significant improvement in its performance.

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Articles
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Natural Language Engineering , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , October 2012 , pp. 549 - 573
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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