Collocation translation based on sentence alignment and parsing

To date, substantial efforts have been devoted to the extraction of collocations from text corpora. However, only a few works deal with the subsequent processing of results in order for these to be successfully integrated into the NLP applications that could benefit from them (e.g., machine translation). This paper presents an accurate method for identifying translation equivalents of collocations in parallel text, whose main strengths are that : it can handle flexible (not only rigid) collocations ; it only requires limited resources and computation (no full alignment, no training needed) ; it deals with several language pairs, and it can even work when no bilingual dictionary is available. The method relies heavily on syntactic information provided by the Fips multilingual parser. Evaluation performed on 4000 verb-object collocations for different language pairs showed an average accuracy of 89.8% and a reasonable coverage (70.9%). These figures are higher that those reported in the evaluation of related work in collocation translation. Mots-clés : traduction de collocations, extraction de collocations, parsing, alignement de textes.