Automatic term pair extraction from bilingual patent corpus

This paper proposes two approaches to extract translation term pairs from Chinese-English bilingual corpus with more than 500,000 patents. One approach is precision-oriented, in which we compare six term alignment methods. Based on our experiments, we find that the EM (Expectation Maximization) method is the best. However, it is time-consuming and hard to extract many-to-many translations for the same concept. While the MI (mutual information) method performs worst, the term pairs extracted may be totally different from those by EM. This may inspire subsequent researches to study the possibility of hybrid term alignment methods. The other approach is recall-oriented, in which a simple idea was proposed. With an efficient implementation, 20% more term pairs were extracted based on an existing lingual lexicon which already has more than one million term pairs merged from several sources.