Automatic Extraction of Synonyms for German Particle Verbs from Parallel Data with Distributional Similarity as a Re-Ranking Feature
Moritz Wittmann, Marion Weller, Sabine Schulte im Walde · 2014
We present a method for the extraction of synonyms for German particle verbs based on a word-aligned German-English parallel corpus: by translating the particle verb to a pivot, which is then translated back, a set of synonym candidates can be extracted and ranked according to the respective translation probabilities.In order to deal with separated particle verbs, we apply re-ordering rules to the German part of the data.In our evaluation against a gold standard, we compare different pre-processing strategies (lemmatized vs. inflected forms) and introduce language model scores of synonym candidates in the context of the input particle verb as well as distributional similarity as additional re-ranking criteria.Our evaluation shows that distributional similarity as a re-ranking feature is more robust than language model scores and leads to an improved ranking of the synonym candidates.In addition to evaluating against a gold standard, we also present a small-scale manual evaluation.