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Analysis of Temporal Adverbial Phrases for Portuguese–Chinese Machine Translation

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (PROPOR 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9727))

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Abstract

Adverbial phrase (AdP) contains rich and indispensable information, however, translating them properly is one of big challenges for machine translation (MT) systems. In this paper, we systematically present a contrastive analysis of MT of AdPs from Chinese to Portuguese. Our study is conducted on The International Chinese Newsweekly corpus which consists of 46 Chinese texts (ST) with their respective Portuguese translations given by a state-of-the-art Portuguese–Chinese MT system and human beings (HT). By comparing the syntactic structures of these texts in ST, PCT, and HT sides, we found that nearly 90 % MT outputs suffer structural inconsistency with poor translation qualities. Therefore, we discuss and finally propose a series of grammar rules to address the problem. We believe that this work could inspire both MT researchers and industries to boost the performance of Portuguese–Chinese MT systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Available at http://nlp2ct.cis.umac.mo/views/pct/pct.html.

  2. 2.

    Annotation and Analysis of Bilingual Syntactic Trees for Chinese/Portuguese (Autema-Syntree), University of Macau Research Grant MYRG102 (Y2-L2)-FSH11-ALL, a research project aimed at solving structural inconsistency of translated texts. This work is a part of the research project.

  3. 3.

    Avaliable at http://nlp2ct.cis.umac.mo/syntaxToolkit/builder.html.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Macau S.A.R., China

    Siyou Liu & Ana Luisa Varani Leal

Authors
  1. Siyou Liu
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  2. Ana Luisa Varani Leal
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Siyou Liu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade de Lisbon, Portugal

    João Silva

  2. ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ricardo Ribeiro

  3. Universidade de Évora, Évora, Portugal

    Paulo Quaresma

  4. Universidade de Caxias do Sul, Caxias do Suö, Brazil

    André Adami

  5. Universidade de Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal

    António Branco

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Liu, S., Leal, A.L.V. (2016). Analysis of Temporal Adverbial Phrases for Portuguese–Chinese Machine Translation. In: Silva, J., Ribeiro, R., Quaresma, P., Adami, A., Branco, A. (eds) Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9727. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41552-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41552-9_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-41551-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-41552-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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