Cross-lingual Terminology Extraction for Translation Quality Estimation

Yu Yuan, Yuze Gao, Yue Zhang, Serge Sharoff

Abstract: We explore ways of identifying terms from monolingual texts and integrate them into investigating the contribution of terminology to translation quality.The researchers proposed a supervised learning method using common statistical measures for termhood and unithood as features to train classifiers for identifying terms in cross-domain and cross-language settings. On its basis, sequences of words from source texts (STs) and target texts (TTs) are aligned naively through a fuzzy matching mechanism for identifying the correctly translated term equivalents in student translations. Correlation analyses further show that normalized term occurrences in translations have weak linear relationship with translation quality in term of usefulness/transfer, terminology/style, idiomatic writing and target mechanics and near- and above-strong relationship with the overall translation quality. This method has demonstrated some reliability in automatically identifying terms in human translations. However, drawbacks in handling low frequency terms and term variations shall be dealt in the future.