Automatic Construction of Clean Broad-Coverage Translation Lexicons

Word level translational equivalences can be extracted from parallel texts by surprisingly simple statistical techniques However these techniques are easily fooled by indirect associations pairs of unrelated words whose statistical properties resemble those of mutual translations Indirect associations pollute the resulting translation lexicons drastically reducing their precision This paper presents an iterative lexicon cleaning method On each iteration most of the remaining incor rect lexicon entries are ltered out without signi cant degradation in recall This lexicon cleaning technique can produce translation lexicons with recall and preci sion both exceeding as well as dictionary sized translation lexicons that are over correct