Bilingual lexicon induction is the task of inducing word translations from monolingual corpora in two languages. In this article we present the most comprehensive analysis of bilingual lexicon induction to date. We present experiments on a wide range of languages and data sizes. We examine translation into English from 25 foreign languages: Albanian, Azeri, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Cebuano, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Nepali, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Somali, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese, and Welsh. We analyze the behavior of bilingual lexicon induction on low-frequency words, rather than testing solely on high-frequency words, as previous research has done. Low-frequency words are more relevant to statistical machine translation, where systems typically lack translations of rare words that fall outside of their training data. We systematically explore a wide range of features and phenomena that affect the quality of the translations discovered by bilingual lexicon induction. We provide illustrative examples of the highest ranking translations for orthogonal signals of translation equivalence like contextual similarity and temporal similarity. We analyze the effects of frequency and burstiness, and the sizes of the seed bilingual dictionaries and the monolingual training corpora. Additionally, we introduce a novel discriminative approach to bilingual lexicon induction. Our discriminative model is capable of combining a wide variety of features that individually provide only weak indications of translation equivalence. When feature weights are discriminatively set, these signals produce dramatically higher translation quality than previous approaches that combined signals in an unsupervised fashion (e.g., using minimum reciprocal rank). We also directly compare our model’s performance against a sophisticated generative approach, the matching canonical correlation analysis (MCCA) algorithm used by Haghighi et al. (2008). Our algorithm achieves an accuracy of 42% versus MCCA’s 15%.

We present the American Local News Corpus (ALNC), containing over 4 billion words of text from 2,652 online newspapers in the United States. Each article in the corpus is associated with a timestamp, state, and city. All 50 U.S. states and 1,924 cities are represented. We detail our method for taking daily snapshots of thousands of local and national newspapers and present two example corpus analyses. The first explores how different sports are talked about over time and geography. The second compares per capita murder rates with news coverage of murders across the 50 states. The ALNC is about the same size as the Gigaword corpus and is growing continuously. Version 1.0 is available for research use.

We present a large scale study of the languages spoken by bilingual workers on Mechanical Turk (MTurk). We establish a methodology for determining the language skills of anonymous crowd workers that is more robust than simple surveying. We validate workers’ self-reported language skill claims by measuring their ability to correctly translate words, and by geolocating workers to see if they reside in countries where the languages are likely to be spoken. Rather than posting a one-off survey, we posted paid tasks consisting of 1,000 assignments to translate a total of 10,000 words in each of 100 languages. Our study ran for several months, and was highly visible on the MTurk crowdsourcing platform, increasing the chances that bilingual workers would complete it. Our study was useful both to create bilingual dictionaries and to act as census of the bilingual speakers on MTurk. We use this data to recommend languages with the largest speaker populations as good candidates for other researchers who want to develop crowdsourced, multilingual technologies. To further demonstrate the value of creating data via crowdsourcing, we hire workers to create bilingual parallel corpora in six Indian languages, and use them to train statistical machine translation systems.

We develop two techniques for analyzing the effect of porting a machine translation system to a new domain. One is a macro-level analysis that measures how domain shift affects corpus-level evaluation; the second is a micro-level analysis for word-level errors. We apply these methods to understand what happens when a Parliament-trained phrase-based machine translation system is applied in four very different domains: news, medical texts, scientific articles and movie subtitles. We present quantitative and qualitative experiments that highlight opportunities for future research in domain adaptation for machine translation.

Much of the previous work on transliteration has depended on resources and attributes specific to particular language pairs. In this work, rather than focus on a single language pair, we create robust models for transliterating from all languages in a large, diverse set to English. We create training data for 150 languages by mining name pairs from Wikipedia. We train 13 systems and analyze the effects of the amount of training data on transliteration performance. We also present an analysis of the types of errors that the systems make. Our analyses are particularly valuable for building machine translation systems for low resource languages, where creating and integrating a transliteration module for a language with few NLP resources may provide substantial gains in translation performance.