A Generalized Alignment-Free Phrase Extraction

Bing Zhao, Stephan Vogel

Abstract: In this paper, we present a phrase extraction algorithm using a translation lexicon, a fertility model, and a simple distortion model. Except these models, we do not need explicit word alignments for phrase extraction. For each phrase pair (a block), a bilingual lexicon based score is computed to estimate the translation quality between the source and target phrase pairs; a fertility score is computed to estimate how good the lengths are matched between phrase pairs; a center distortion score is computed to estimate the relative position divergence between the phrase pairs. We presented the results and our experience in the shared tasks on French-English.