Automatic Extraction of Synonyms for German Particle Verbs from Parallel Data with Distributional Similarity as a Re-Ranking Feature

Moritz Wittmann, Marion Weller, Sabine Schulte im Walde

Abstract
We present a method for the extraction of synonyms for German particle verbs based on a word-aligned German-English parallel corpus: by translating the particle verb to a pivot, which is then translated back, a set of synonym candidates can be extracted and ranked according to the respective translation probabilities. In order to deal with separated particle verbs, we apply re-ordering rules to the German part of the data. In our evaluation against a gold standard, we compare different pre-processing strategies (lemmatized vs. inflected forms) and introduce language model scores of synonym candidates in the context of the input particle verb as well as distributional similarity as additional re-ranking criteria. Our evaluation shows that distributional similarity as a re-ranking feature is more robust than language model scores and leads to an improved ranking of the synonym candidates. In addition to evaluating against a gold standard, we also present a small-scale manual evaluation.
Anthology ID:
L14-1464
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1430–1437
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/574_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Moritz Wittmann, Marion Weller, and Sabine Schulte im Walde. 2014. Automatic Extraction of Synonyms for German Particle Verbs from Parallel Data with Distributional Similarity as a Re-Ranking Feature. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 1430–1437, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Extraction of Synonyms for German Particle Verbs from Parallel Data with Distributional Similarity as a Re-Ranking Feature (Wittmann et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/574_Paper.pdf
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