Abstract
We present a systematic comparison of preprocessing techniques for two language pairs: English-Czech and English-Hindi. The two target languages, although both belonging to the Indo-European language family, show significant differences in morphology, syntax and word order. We describe how TectoMT, a successful framework for analysis and generation of language, can be used as preprocessor for a phrase-based MT system.We compare the two language pairs and the optimal sets of source-language transformations applied to them. The following transformations are examples of possible preprocessing steps: lemmatization; retokenization, compound splitting; removing/adding words lacking counterparts in the other language; phrase reordering to resemble the target word order; marking syntactic functions. TectoMT, as well as all other tools and data sets we use, are freely available on the Web.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Nießen, S., Ney, H.: Statistical Machine Translation with Scarce Resources Using Morpho-Syntactic Information. Computational Linguistics 30(2), 181–204 (2004)
Collins, M., Koehn, P., Kučerová, I.: Clause Restructuring for Statistical Machine Translation. In: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the ACL, pp. 531–540. ACL, Ann Arbor (2005)
Popović, M., Vilar, D., Ney, H., Jovičić, S., Šarić, Z.: Augmenting a Small Parallel Text with Morpho-Syntactic Language. In: Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts, pp. 41–48. ACL, Ann Arbor (2005)
Goldwater, S., McClosky, D.: Improving Statistical MT through Morphological Analysis. In: Proceedings of HLT-EMNLP, pp. 676–683. ACL, Vancouver (2005)
Habash, N., Sadat, F.: Arabic Preprocessing Schemes for Statistical Machine Translation. In: Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL, pp. 49–52. ACL, New York (2006)
El Isbihani, A., Khadivi, S., Bender, O., Ney, H.: Morpho-syntactic Arabic Preprocessing for Arabic-to-English Statistical Machine Translation. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, pp. 15–22. ACL, New York (2006)
Prokopová, M.: Automatic Simplification of Texts for Translation. Master’s thesis, Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Praha, Czechia (2007)
Avramidis, E., Koehn, P.: Enriching Morphologically Poor Languages for Statistical Machine Translation. In: Proceedings of ACL 2008: HLT, pp. 763–770. ACL, Columbus (2008)
Axelrod, A., Yang, M., Duh, K., Kirchhoff, K.: The University of Washington Machine Translation System for ACL WMT 2008. In: Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, pp. 123–126. ACL, Columbus, Ohio (2008)
Popović, M., Vilar, D., Stein, D., Matusov, E., Ney, H.: The RWTH Machine Translation System for WMT 2009. In: Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, pp. 66–69. ACL, Athîna, Greece (2009)
Ramanathan, A., Choudhary, H., Ghosh, A., Bhattacharyya, P.: Case Markers and Morphology: Addressing the Crux of the Fluency Problem in English-Hindi SMT. In: Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th IJCNLP of the AFNLP, pp. 800–808. ACL and AFNLP, Suntec (2009)
Žabokrtský, Z., Ptáček, J., Pajas, P.: TectoMT: Highly Modular MT System with Tectogrammatics Used as Transfer Layer. In: Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, pp. 167–170. ACL, Columbus (2008)
Votrubec, J.: Selecting an Optimal Set of Features for the Morphological Tagging of Czech. Master thesis, Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Praha, Czechia (2005)
McDonald, R., Pereira, F., Ribarov, K., Hajič, J.: Non-projective Dependency Parsing using Spanning Tree Algorithms. In: Proceedings of the Human Language Technology / Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing conference (HLT-EMNLP), pp. 523–530. ACL, Vancouver
Li, Z., Callison-Burch, C., Khudanpur, S., Thornton, W.: Decoding in Joshua: Open Source, Parsing-Based Machine Translation. The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 91, 47–56
Venkatapathy, S.: NLP Tools Contest – 2008: Summary. In: Proceedings of ICON 2008 NLP Tools Contest, Pune, India (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zeman, D. (2010). Using TectoMT as a Preprocessing Tool for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6231. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15760-8_28
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15760-8_28
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15759-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15760-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)