Target Word Selection as Proximity in Semantic Space

Lexical selection is a significant problem for widecoverage machine translation: depending on the context, a given source language word can often be translated into different target language words. In this paper I propose a method for target word selection that assumes the appropriate translation is more similar to the translated context than are the alternatives. Similarity of a word to a context is estimated using a proximity measure in corpusderived "semantic space". The method is evaluated using an English-Spanish parallel corpus of colloquial dialogue.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Scott McDonald
• Keywords: ACL 1998, ACL 2007, Language Words, Source Language Word, Target Word Selection