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Bilingual Contexts from Comparable Corpora to Mine for Translations of Collocations

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Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9624))

Abstract

Due to the limited availability of parallel data in many languages, we propose a methodology that benefits from comparable corpora to find translation equivalents for collocations (as a specific type of difficult-to-translate multi-word expressions). Finding translations is known to be more difficult for collocations than for words. We propose a method based on bilingual context extraction and build a word (distributional) representation model drawing on these bilingual contexts (bilingual English-Spanish contexts in our case). We show that the bilingual context construction is effective for the task of translation equivalent learning and that our method outperforms a simplified distributional similarity baseline in finding translation equivalents.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We use the lexicon built by applying GIZA++ on the Spanish–English portion of the Europarl.

  2. 2.

    The software is available in the websites of the authors of [13].

  3. 3.

    We set the frequency threshold to 10 in our experiments.

  4. 4.

    http://www.abc.es and http://www.abc.net.au.

  5. 5.

    http://es.noticias.yahoo.com and http://uk.news.yahoo.com.

  6. 6.

    http://cnnespanol.cnn.com and http://cnn.com.

  7. 7.

    http://www.sport.es/es and http://www.sport-english.com/en.

  8. 8.

    http://es.euronews.com and http://euronews.net.

  9. 9.

    http://www.accurat-project.eu.

  10. 10.

    The comparable corpora that we prepared is available on https://github.com/shivaat/EnEsCC.

  11. 11.

    Note that we add noise in both Spanish–English and English–Spanish directions.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by the LATEST (Ref: 327197-FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF) project. The authors would like to express their gratitude to Anna de Santis and Lorena Gomez for their annotation work.

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Correspondence to Shiva Taslimipoor .

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Taslimipoor, S., Mitkov, R., Corpas Pastor, G., Fazly, A. (2018). Bilingual Contexts from Comparable Corpora to Mine for Translations of Collocations. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9624. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75487-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75487-1_10

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