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Parallel Corpora for Contrastive and Translation Studies: New resources and applications
Edited by Irene Doval and M. Teresa Sánchez Nieto
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 90] 2019
► pp. 267–279

Discovering bilingual collocations in parallel corpora

A first attempt at using distributional semantics

| University of A Coruña
| University of A Coruña
| University of A Coruña

This chapter presents a method that exploits parallel corpora to automatically extract bilingual collocation equivalents. First, we use dependency parsing and statistical measures to identify collocation candidates in corpora. Then, we leverage the parallel corpora to extract bilingual word-embeddings. Finally, we use these distributional models as probabilistic dictionaries in order to identify bilingual collocation equivalents. To evaluate our strategy we carry out a set of experiments in Portuguese and Spanish focusing on verb-object collocations, for example, “reach the maturity” (“atingir a maturidade” in Portuguese, “alcanzar la madurez” in Spanish). The results of our experiments show that this method is useful to automatically identify thousands of bilingual collocation equivalents, achieving a precision of 86%.

Keywords: collocations, distributional semantics, phraseology, parallel corpora
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research on bilingual collocation extraction
  • 3.The proposed strategy
    • 3.1Extracting monolingual collocation candidates
    • 3.2Bilingual distributional semantics model
    • 3.3Bilingual alignment of monolingual collocations
  • 4.Evaluation
    • 4.1Data
    • 4.2Monolingual extraction and bilingual alignment
    • 4.3Results
    • 4.4Error analysis
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 20 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.90.16gon
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