Automatically acquiring synonymous collocation pairs such as <turn on, OBJ, light> and <switch on, OBJ, light> from corpora is a challenging task. For this task, we can, in general, have a large monolingual corpus and/or a very limited bilingual corpus. Methods that use monolingual corpora alone or use bilingual corpora alone are apparently inadequate because of low precision or low coverage. In this paper, we propose a method that uses both these resources to get an optimal compromise of precision and coverage. This method first gets candidates of synonymous collocation pairs based on a monolingual corpus and a word thesaurus, and then selects the appropriate pairs from the candidates using their translations in a second language. The translations of the candidates are obtained with a statistical translation model which is trained with a small bilingual corpus and a large monolingual corpus. The translation information is proved as effective to select synonymous collocation pairs. Experimental results indicate that the average precision and recall of our approach are 74% and 64% respectively, which outperform those methods that only use monolingual corpora and those that only use bilingual corpora.
Besides, REF exploited bilingual corpora and translation information in learning synonymous collocations.
Synonymous Collocation Extraction Using Translation Information
Annual Meeting Of The Association For Computational Linguistics
Computer Science