From free shallow monolingual resources to machine translation systems

The availability of machine-readable bilingual linguistic resources is crucial not only for machine translation but also for other applications such as cross-lingual information retrieval. However, the building of such resources demands extensive manual work. This paper describes a methodology to build automatically bilingual dictionaries and transfer rules by extracting knowledge from word-aligned parallel corpora processed with free shallow monolingual resources (morphological analysers and part-of-speech taggers). Experiments for Brazilian Portuguese– Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese– English parallel texts have shown promising results.