A hybrid approach to compiling bilingual dictionaries of medical terms from parallel corpora

Abstract

Existing bilingual dictionaries of technical terms suffer from limited coverage and are only available for a small number of language pairs. In response to these problems, we present a method for automatically constructing and updating bilingual dictionaries of medical terms by exploiting parallel corpora. We focus on the extraction of multiword terms, which constitute a challenging problem for term alignment algorithms. We apply our method to two low resourced language pairs, namely English-Greek and English-Romanian, for which such resources did not previously exist in the medical domain. Our approach combines two term alignment models to improve the accuracy of the extracted medical term translations. Evaluation results show that the precision of our method is 86% and 81% for English-Greek and English-Romanian respectively, considering only the highest ranked candidate translation.