  Automatic segmentation of text into minimal content-bearing units is an
unsolved problem even for languages like English. Spaces between words offer an
easy first approximation, but this approximation is not good enough for machine
translation (MT), where many word sequences are not translated word-for-word.
This paper presents an efficient automatic method for discovering sequences of
words that are translated as a unit. The method proceeds by comparing pairs of
statistical translation models induced from parallel texts in two languages. It
can discover hundreds of non-compositional compounds on each iteration, and
constructs longer compounds out of shorter ones. Objective evaluation on a
simple machine translation task has shown the method's potential to improve the
quality of MT output. The method makes few assumptions about the data, so it
can be applied to parallel data other than parallel texts, such as word
spellings and pronunciations.
