Translating named entities using monolingual and bilingual resources

Abstract

Named entity phrases are some of the most difficult phrases to translate because new phrases can appear from nowhere, and because many are domain specific, not to be found in bilingual dictionaries. We present a novel algorithm for translating named entity phrases using easily obtainable monolingual and bilingual resources. We report on the application and evaluation of this algorithm in translating Arabic named entities to English. We also compare our results with the results obtained from human translations and a commercial system for the same task.