Non-probabilistic alignment of rare German and English nominal expressions

We present an alignment strategy that specifically deals with the correct alignment of rare German nominal compounds to their English multiword translations. It recognizes compounds and multiwords based on their character lengths and on their most frequent POS-patterns, and aligns them based on their length ratios. Our approach is designed on the basis of a data analysis on roughly 500 German hapax legomena, and as it does not use any frequency or co-occurrence information, it is well-suited to align rare compounds, but also achieves good results for more frequent expressions. Experiment results show that the strategy is able to correctly identify correct translations for 70% of the compound hapaxes in our data set. Additionally, we checked on 700 randomly chosen entries in the dictionary that was automatically generated by our alignment tool. Results of this experiment also indicate that our strategy works for non-hapaxes as well, including finding multiple correct translations for the same head compound.