5,849 research outputs found
Parallel Strands: A Preliminary Investigation into Mining the Web for Bilingual Text
Parallel corpora are a valuable resource for machine translation, but at
present their availability and utility is limited by genre- and
domain-specificity, licensing restrictions, and the basic difficulty of
locating parallel texts in all but the most dominant of the world's languages.
A parallel corpus resource not yet explored is the World Wide Web, which hosts
an abundance of pages in parallel translation, offering a potential solution to
some of these problems and unique opportunities of its own. This paper presents
the necessary first step in that exploration: a method for automatically
finding parallel translated documents on the Web. The technique is conceptually
simple, fully language independent, and scalable, and preliminary evaluation
results indicate that the method may be accurate enough to apply without human
intervention.Comment: LaTeX2e, 11 pages, 7 eps figures; uses psfig, llncs.cls, theapa.sty.
An Appendix at http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/amta98/amta98_appendix.html
contains test dat
Embedding Web-based Statistical Translation Models in Cross-Language Information Retrieval
Although more and more language pairs are covered by machine translation
services, there are still many pairs that lack translation resources.
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is an application which needs
translation functionality of a relatively low level of sophistication since
current models for information retrieval (IR) are still based on a
bag-of-words. The Web provides a vast resource for the automatic construction
of parallel corpora which can be used to train statistical translation models
automatically. The resulting translation models can be embedded in several ways
in a retrieval model. In this paper, we will investigate the problem of
automatically mining parallel texts from the Web and different ways of
integrating the translation models within the retrieval process. Our
experiments on standard test collections for CLIR show that the Web-based
translation models can surpass commercial MT systems in CLIR tasks. These
results open the perspective of constructing a fully automatic query
translation device for CLIR at a very low cost.Comment: 37 page
Building a Parallel Corpus on the World's Oldest Banking Magazine
We report on our processing steps to build a diachronic parallel corpus based on the world's oldest banking magazine. The magazine has been published since 1895 in German, with translations in French and partly in English and Italian. Our data sources are printed issues (until 1997), PDF issues (since 1998) and HTML files (since 2001). The corpus building poses special challenges in article boundary recognition and cross-language article and sentence alignment. Our corpus fills a gap in parallel corpora with respect to genre (magazine articles), domain (banking and economy articles), and its time span (120 years)
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