Alignment of bilingual named entities in parallel corpora using statistical model

Abstract

Named entities make up a bulk of documents. Extracting named entities is crucial to various applications of natural language processing. Although efforts to identify named entities within monolingual documents are numerous, extracting bilingual named entities has not been investigated extensively owing to the complexity of the task. In this paper, we describe a statistical phrase translation model and a statistical transliteration model. Under the proposed models, a new method is proposed to align bilingual named entities in parallel corpora. Experimental results indicate that a satisfactory precision rate can be achieved. To enhance the performance, we also describe how to improve the proposed method by incorporating approximate matching and person name recognition. Experimental results show that performance is significantly improved with the enhancement. © Springer-Verlag 2004.