Analysing linguistic information about word combinations for a Spanish-Basque rule-based machine translation system

This paper describes an in-depth analysis of noun+ verb combinations in Spanish-Basque translations. Firstly, we examined noun+ verb constructions in the dictionary, and confirmed that this kind of MWU varies considerably from language to language, which justifies the need for their specific treatment in MT systems. Then, we searched for those combinations in a parallel corpus, and we selected the most frequently-occurring ones to analyse them further and classify them according to their level of syntactic fixedness and semantic compositionality. We tested whether adding linguistic data relevant to MWUs improved the detection of Spanish combinations, and we found that, indeed, the number of MWUs identified increased by 30.30% with a precision of 97.61%. Finally, we also evaluated how an RBMT system translated the MWUs we analysed, and concluded that at least 44.44% needed to be corrected or improved.