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Translating Collocations for Bilingual Lexicons: A Statistical Approach

Summary

Collocations are conventional word combinations such as "make ... decision". They resist word-by-word translation, and bilingual dictionaries rarely list their equivalents. The authors present Champollion, a system that takes a sentence-aligned English–French parallel corpus and a list of source-language collocations, then proposes a target-language translation for each.

It measures association with the Dice coefficient. First, it picks French words strongly tied to the English collocation. It then grows candidate word groups step by step (pairs, triples, and so on), keeping only groups that remain strongly correlated. Finally, it chooses the largest, best-scoring group. Corpus examples determine whether the French word order is fixed (rigid) or variable (flexible). Source and target lengths may differ, and discontinuous collocations are supported, unlike earlier methods limited to noun phrases.

The test set was English collocations extracted by XTRACT from three yearly slices of the Hansards. Bilingual evaluators judged 73% of Champollion's output correct on average. The approach offers a way to build domain-specific bilingual phrase lexicons for transfer and interlingua MT, cross-language retrieval and generation.

Key points

  • Champollion produces p-word French translations of n-word English collocations, where n and p can differ. For example, "employment equity" becomes "équité en matière d'emploi" and "stock market" becomes "bourse".
  • Each of three Hansards years supplied 300 randomly chosen medium-frequency collocations, extracted with XTRACT (Smadja 1993). Database corpora of different sizes were used for translation.
  • Accuracy ranged from 65% to 78% (73% on average). The weaker result improved when a larger database corpus was used.
  • Unlike Kupiec (1993), van der Eijk (1993) and Termight (Dagan and Church 1994), Champollion handles flexible collocations whose words may be separated by gaps, not just contiguous noun phrases.
  • The method requires a pre-aligned bilingual corpus, using length-based sentence alignment in the style of Gale and Church. The authors name work on noisy and nonparallel corpora as future work.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Natural language processing

Cited by

109 papers of our library cite it (of the 140884 whose bibliographies we read); 4 of them have a page here, 105 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{smadja1996translating,
  title = {{Translating Collocations for Bilingual Lexicons: A Statistical Approach}},
  author = {Smadja, Frank and McKeown, Kathleen R. and Hatzivassiloglou, Vasileios},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1996},
  doi = {10.7916/d8c82m3r},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7916/d8c82m3r}
}

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