Information Retrieval in Translation Memory Systems: Assessment of CurrentLimitations and Possibilities for Future Development

摘要

A translation memory system is a new type of human language technology (HLT) tool that is gaining popularity among translators. Such tools allow translators to store previously translated texts in a type of aligned bilingual database, and to recycle relevant parts of these texts when producing new translations. Currently, these tools retrieve information from the database using superficial character string matching, which often results in poor precision and recall. This paper explains how translation memory systems work, and it considers some possible ways for introducing more sophisticated information retrieval techniques into such systems by taking syntactic and semantic similarity into account. Some of the suggested techniques are inspired by those used in other areas of HLT, and some by techniques used in information science.