  Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) and machine translation (MT)
resources, such as dictionaries and parallel corpora, are scarce and hard to
come by for special domains. Besides, these resources are just limited to a few
languages, such as English, French, and Spanish and so on. So, obtaining
comparable corpora automatically for such domains could be an answer to this
problem effectively. Comparable corpora, that the subcorpora are not
translations of each other, can be easily obtained from web. Therefore,
building and using comparable corpora is often a more feasible option in
multilingual information processing. Comparability metrics is one of key issues
in the field of building and using comparable corpus. Currently, there is no
widely accepted definition or metrics method of corpus comparability. In fact,
Different definitions or metrics methods of comparability might be given to
suit various tasks about natural language processing. A new comparability,
namely, termhood-based metrics, oriented to the task of bilingual terminology
extraction, is proposed in this paper. In this method, words are ranked by
termhood not frequency, and then the cosine similarities, calculated based on
the ranking lists of word termhood, is used as comparability. Experiments
results show that termhood-based metrics performs better than traditional
frequency-based metrics.
