SBA-term: Sparse Bilingual Association for Terms

Bilingual semantic term association is very useful in cross-language information retrieval, statistical machine translation, and many other applications in natural language processing. In this paper, we present a method, named SBA-term, which applies sparse linear regression (Lasso, Least Squares with l₁ penalty) and L₂ rescaling for design matrix to the task of bilingual term association. The approach hinges on formulating the task as a feature selection problem within a classification framework. Our experimental results indicate that our novel proposed method is more efficient than co-occurrence at extracting relevant bilingual terms semantic associations. In addition, our approach connects the vibrant area of sparse machine learning to an important problem of natural language processing.