Bilingual Collocation Extraction Based on Syntactic and Statistical Analyses

In this paper, we describe an algorithm that employs syntactic and statistical analysis to extract bilingual collocations from a parallel corpus. The preferred syntactic patterns are obtained from idioms and collocations in a machine-readable dictionary. Phrases matching the patterns are extract from aligned sentences in a parallel corpus. Those phrases are subsequently matched up via cross-linguistic statistical association. Statistical association between the whole collocations as well as words in collocations is used jointly to link a collocation and its counterpart collocation in the other language. We experimented with an implementation of the proposed method on a very large Chinese-English parallel corpus with satisfactory results.