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Multiword Units in Machine Translation and Translation Technology
Edited by Ruslan Mitkov, Johanna Monti, Gloria Corpas Pastor and Violeta Seretan
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 341] 2018
► pp. 125–146

A multilingual gold standard for translation spotting of German compounds and their corresponding multiword units in English, French, Italian and Spanish

This article describes a new word alignment gold standard for German nominal compounds and their multiword translation equivalents in English, French, Italian, and Spanish. The gold standard contains alignments for each of the ten language pairs, resulting in a total of 8,229 bidirectional alignments. It covers 362 occurrences of 137 different German compounds randomly selected from the corpus of European Parliament plenary sessions, sampled according to the criteria of frequency and morphological complexity. The standard serves for the evaluation and optimisation of automatic word alignments in the context of spotting translations of German compounds. The study also shows that in this text genre, around 80% of German noun types are morphological compounds indicating potential multiword units in their parallel equivalents.
Keywords: gold standard, word alignment, compounding, multilinguality, German, English, Spanish, Italian, French
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Related work
  • 2.Resources
    • 2.1Selection and preprocessing of the gold standard material
    • 2.2Annotation guidelines and annotation process
  • 3.Evaluation and discussion
    • 3.1Quality of universal part-of-speech (UPOS) tagging
    • 3.2Aligned UPOS tags across languages
    • 3.3Complexity of the compounds and aligned MWUs
    • 3.4Evaluation of the quality of the automatic GIZA++ word alignment
    • 3.5Optimisation of the directed word alignments through symmetrisation
    • 3.6Frequency effects
    • 3.7Effects of morphological complexity
    • 3.8Lexicalisation and variability
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 20 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.341.06cle
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