Improving Corpus Comparability for Bilingual Lexicon Extraction from Comparable Corpora

Abstract

Previous work on bilingual lexicon extraction from comparable corpora aimed at finding a good representation for the usage patterns of source and target words and at comparing these patterns efficiently. In this paper, we try to work it out in another way: improving the quality of the comparable corpus from which the bilingual lexicon has to be extracted. To do so, we propose a measure of comparability and a strategy to improve the quality of a given corpus through an iterative construction process. Our approach, being general, can be used with any existing bilingual lexicon extraction method. We show here that it leads to a significant improvement over standard bilingual lexicon extraction methods. 1