Translating Collocations for Use in Bilingual Lexicons

Collocations are notoriously difficult for non-native speakers to translate, primarily because they are opaque and can not be translated on a word by word basis. We describe a program named Champollion which, given a pair of parallel corpora in two different languages, automatically produces translations of an input list of collocations. Our goal is to provide a tool to compile bilingual lexical information above the word level in multiple languages and domains. The algorithm we use is based on statistical methods and produces p word translations of n word collocations in which n and p need not be the same; the collocations can be either flexible or fixed compounds. For example, Champollion translates "to make a decision," "employment equity," and "stock market," respectively into: "prendre une decision," "tquit6 en mati~re d'emploi," and "bourse." Testing and evaluation of Champollion on one year's worth of the Hansards corpus yielded 300 collocations and their translations, evaluated at 77% accuracy. In this paper, we describe the statistical measures used, the algorithm, and the implementation of Champollion, presenting our results and evaluation.