Frequency-based identification of correct translation equivalents (FITE) obtained through transformation rules

  • Authors:

  • Ari Pirkola;Jarmo Toivonen;Heikki Keskustalo;Kalervo Järvelin

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Tampere, Finland;University of Tampere, Finland;University of Tampere, Finland;University of Tampere, Finland

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We devised a novel statistical technique for the identification of the translation equivalents of source words obtained by transformation rule based translation (TRT). The effectiveness of the technique called frequency-based identification of translation equivalents (FITE) was tested using biological and medical cross-lingual spelling variants and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words in Spanish-English and Finnish-English TRT. The results showed that, depending on the source language and frequency corpus, FITE-TRT (the identification of translation equivalents from TRT's translation set by means of the FITE technique) may achieve high translation recall. In the case of the Web as the frequency corpus, translation recall was 89.2%--91.0% for Spanish-English FITE-TRT. For both language pairs FITE-TRT achieved high translation precision: 95.0%--98.8%. The technique also reliably identified native source language words: source words that cannot be correctly translated by TRT. Dictionary-based CLIR augmented with FITE-TRT performed substantially better than basic dictionary-based CLIR where OOV keys were kept intact. FITE-TRT with Web document frequencies was the best technique among several fuzzy translation/matching approaches tested in cross-language retrieval experiments. We also discuss the application of FITE-TRT in the automatic construction of multilingual dictionaries.