Building Comparable Corpora for Assessing Multi-Word Term Alignment

Recent work has demonstrated the importance of dealing with Multi-Word Terms (MWTs) in several Natural Language Processing applications. In particular, MWTs pose serious challenges for alignment and machine translation systems because of their syntactic and semantic properties. Thus, developing algorithms that handle MWTs is becoming essential for many NLP tasks. However, the availability of bilingual and more generally multi-lingual resources is limited, especially for low-resourced languages and in specialized domains. In this paper, we propose an approach for building comparable corpora and bilingual term dictionaries that help evaluate bilingual term alignment in comparable corpora. To that aim, we exploit parallel corpora to perform automatic bilingual MWT extraction and comparable corpus construction. Parallel information helps to align bilingual MWTs and makes it easier to build comparable specialized sub-corpora. Experimental validation on an existing dataset and on manually annotated data shows the interest of the proposed methodology.