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Investigating Genre and Method Variation in Translation Using Text Classification

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Book cover Text, Speech, and Dialogue (TSD 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9302))

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose the use of automatic text classification methods to analyse variation in English-German translations from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. The experiments described in this paper are carried out in two steps. We trained classifiers to 1) discriminate between different genres (fiction, political essays, etc.); and 2) identify the translation method (machine vs. human). Using semi-delexicalized models (excluding all nouns), we report results of up to 60.5% F-measure in distinguishing human and machine translations and 45.4% in discriminating between seven different genres. More than the classification performance itself, we argue that text classification methods can level out discriminative features of different variables (genres and translation methods) thus enabling researchers to investigate in more detail the properties of each of them.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Marcos Zampieri & Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski

  2. German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany

    Marcos Zampieri

Authors
  1. Marcos Zampieri
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  2. Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marcos Zampieri .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic

    Pavel Král

  2. University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic

    Václav Matoušek

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Zampieri, M., Lapshinova-Koltunski, E. (2015). Investigating Genre and Method Variation in Translation Using Text Classification. In: Král, P., Matoušek, V. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9302. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24033-6_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24033-6_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-24032-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-24033-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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