Abstract
We introduce a method for learning to find domain-specific translations for a given term on the Web. In our approach, the source term is transformed into an expanded query aimed at maximizing the probability of retrieving translations from a very large collection of mixed-code documents. The method involves automatically generating sets of target language words from training data in specific domains, automatically selecting target words for effectiveness in retrieving documents containing the sought-after translations. At run time, the given term is transformed into an expanded query and submitted to a search engine, and ranked translations are extracted from the document snippets returned by the search engine. We present a prototype, TermMine, which applies the method to a Web search engine. Evaluations over a set of domains and terms show that TermMine outperforms state-of-the-art machine translation systems.