Software tools to support the construction of bilingual terminology lexicons

Many problems in terminology translation can be solved by working with existing translated texts. However, large-scale bilingual lexicon building from previously translated documents takes a lot of human effort. This chapter describes an automatic terminology alignment algorithm that can be used as a valuable pre-processing step in the interactive process of lexicon construction. The system can present the human expert with a summary of the plausible translations of high enough quality that it can reduce the number of sentences which need to be read by roughly a factor of five in many cases. When compared to a manually constructed lexicon in a particular case study, the automatic system achieved a precision of 56% and an exact recall of 70%. In addition, more than half the remaining terms can be obtained with minimal edit operations on the extracted text.