We describe a method for identifying subsentential phrasal translation examples in sentencealigned parallel corpora, using only a probabilistic translation lexicon for the language pair. Our method differs from previous approaches in that (1) it is founded on a formal basis, making use of an inversion transduction grammar (ITG) formalism that we recently developed for bilingual language modelin...

In this paper, we propose a simple and intuitive yet linguistically and practically motivated method for English-Chinese name transliteration generation. Our system is essentially a syllable-based Maximum Matching system. It uses the Onset First Principle to syllabify English names and align them with Chinese names. The bilingual lexicon containing aligned segments of various syllable lengths s...

If different languages map words onto referents in different ways, bilinguals must either (a) learn and maintain separate mappings for their two languages or (b) merge them and not be fully native-like in either. We replicated and extended past findings of cross-linguistic differences in word-to-referent mappings for common household objects using Belgian monolingual speakers of Dutch and Frenc...

In this paper, we present a phrase extraction algorithm using a translation lexicon, a fertility model, and a simple distortion model. Except these models, we do not need explicit word alignments for phrase extraction. For each phrase pair (a block), a bilingual lexicon based score is computed to estimate the translation quality between the source and target phrase pairs; a fertility score is c...

We present the design and evaluation of a translator’s amenuensis that uses comparable corpora to propose and rank nonliteral solutions to the translation of expressions from the general lexicon. Using distributional similarity and bilingual dictionaries, the method outperforms established techniques for extracting translation equivalents from parallel corpora. The interface to the system is av...