In the past we have found that this wordassociation metric provides an excellent basis for  learning single-word translation relationships, and the higher the score, the more likely the association is to be a true translation relation.
with this particular metric there is no obvious way to combine the scores for indvidual word pairs into a composite score for phrase translation candidates; so we use the scores indirectly to estimate some relevant probabilities, which can then be combined to yield a composite score.