Analyzing and Aligning German compound nouns

Marion Weller, Ulrich Heid


Abstract
In this paper, we present and evaluate an approach for the compositional alignment of compound nouns using comparable corpora from technical domains. The task of term alignment consists in relating a source language term to its translation in a list of target language terms with the help of a bilingual dictionary. Compound splitting allows to transform a compound into a sequence of components which can be translated separately and then related to multi-word target language terms. We present and evaluate a method for compound splitting, and compare two strategies for term alignment (bag-of-word vs. pattern-based). The simple word-based approach leads to a considerable amount of erroneous alignments, whereas the pattern-based approach reaches a decent precision. We also assess the reasons for alignment failures: in the comparable corpora used for our experiments, a substantial number of terms has no translation in the target language data; furthermore, the non-isomorphic structures of source and target language terms cause alignment failures in many cases.
Anthology ID:
L12-1484
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2395–2400
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/817_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marion Weller and Ulrich Heid. 2012. Analyzing and Aligning German compound nouns. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 2395–2400, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Analyzing and Aligning German compound nouns (Weller & Heid, LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/817_Paper.pdf