Empirical Methods for Exploiting Parallel Texts

Parallel texts (bitexts) are a goldmine of linguistic knowledge, because
the translation of a text into another language can be viewed as a detailed
annotation of what that text means. Knowledge about translational equivalence, which
can be gleaned from bitexts, is of central importance for applications such as
manual and machine translation, cross-language information retrieval, and corpus
linguistics. The availability of bitexts has increased dramatically since the advent
of the Web, making their study an exciting new area of research in natural language
processing. This book lays out the theory and the practical techniques for
discovering and applying translational equivalence at the lexical level. It is a
start-to-finish guide to designing and evaluating many translingual
applications.