Grammarless extraction of phrasal translation examples from parallel texts
Dekai Wu · 1995
We describe a method for identifying subsentential phrasal translation examples in sentencealigned parallel corpora, using only a probabilistic translation lexicon for the language pair. Our method differs from previous approaches in that (1) it is founded on a formal basis, making use of an inversion transduction grammar (ITG) formalism that we recently developed for bilingual language modeling, and (2) it requires no language-specific monolingual grammars for the source and target languages. Instead, we devise a generic, language-independent constituent-matching ITG with inherent expressiveness properties that correspond to a desirable level of matching flexibility. Bilingual parsing, in conjunction with a stochastic version of the ITG formalism, performs the phrasal translation extraction. The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Technical Report Series Department of Computer Science TMI-95 WU 2 1 Introduction Phrasal translation examples at the subsentential level are an...