A Statistical Approach to Machine Aided Translation of Terminology Banks

"l]fis paper reports on a new statistical approach to machine aided translation of terminology bank. The text in the bank is hyphenated and then dissected into roots of 1 to 3 syllables. Both hyphenation and dissection are done with a set of initial probabilities of syllables and roots. The probabilities are repeatedly revised using an EM algorithm. Alter each iteration of hyphenation or dissectioh, the resulting syllables and roots are counted subsequently to yield more precise estimation of probability. The set of roots rapidly converges to a set of most likely roots. Preliminary experhuents have shown promising results. From a terminology bank of more than 4,000 terms, the algorithm extracts 223 general and chemical roots, of which 91% are actually roots. The algoritlun dissects a word into roots with aromld 86% hit rate. The set of roots and their "hand-translation are then used iu a compositional translation of the terminology bank. One can expect the translation of terminology bank using this approach to be more cost-effective, consistent, and with a better closure.