Acquiring translation equivalences of multiword expressions by normalized correlation frequencies

Abstract

In this paper, we present an algorithm for extracting translations of any given multiword expression from parallel corpora. Given a multiword expression to be translated, the method involves extracting a short list of target candidate words from parallel corpora based on scores of normalized frequency, generating possible translations and filtering out common subsequences, and selecting the top-n possible translations using the Dice coefficient. Experiments show that our approach outperforms the word alignment-based and other naive association-based methods. We also demonstrate that adopting the extracted translations can significantly improve the performance of the Moses machine translation system.