Multilingual term extraction from parallel corpora – A methodology for the automatic extraction of verbal structures and their translation equivalents

Abstract

Summary The aim of this paper is to confirm that the methodology used to extract one-token translation candidates from parallel corpora can be extended for the purposes of retrieving multi-word verbal structures. The relevance of this technique from a terminological point of view is that it provides terminologists with empirical data and ample term-candidates, thus facilitating their work. Verbal structures were retrieved from the parallel corpus in a semi-automatic way: a broader range of automatically recognized verbal structures were manually narrowed down to a smaller set of verbal structures that are relevant from a translation point of view. In the next step, every occurrence of the selected verbal structures was merged into a one-token unit in the parallel corpus, so that they could serve as input to the alignment algorithm. Finally, a core dictionary is obtained comprising multi-word verbal structures, their possible translations and the contexts in which they appear.