@inproceedings{iliev-genov-2012-expanding,
    title = "Expanding Parallel Resources for Medium-Density Languages for Free",
    author = "Iliev, Georgi  and
      Genov, Angel",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Choukri, Khalid  and
      Declerck, Thierry  and
      Do{\u{g}}an, Mehmet U{\u{g}}ur  and
      Maegaard, Bente  and
      Mariani, Joseph  and
      Moreno, Asuncion  and
      Odijk, Jan  and
      Piperidis, Stelios",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC}`12)",
    month = may,
    year = "2012",
    address = "Istanbul, Turkey",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/L12-1434/",
    pages = "3937--3943",
    abstract = "We discuss a previously proposed method for augmenting parallel corpora of limited size for the purposes of machine translation through monolingual paraphrasing of the source language. We develop a three-stage shallow paraphrasing procedure to be applied to the Swedish-Bulgarian language pair for which limited parallel resources exist. The source language exhibits specifics not typical of high-density languages already studied in a similar setting. Paraphrases of a highly productive type of compound nouns in Swedish are generated by a corpus-based technique. Certain Swedish noun-phrase types are paraphrased using basic heuristics. Further we introduce noun-phrase morphological variations for better wordform coverage. We evaluate the performance of a phrase-based statistical machine translation system trained on a baseline parallel corpus and on three stages of artificial enlargement of the source-language training data. Paraphrasing is shown to have no effect on performance for the Swedish-English translation task. We show a small, yet consistent, increase in the BLEU score of Swedish-Bulgarian translations of larger token spans on the first enlargement stage. A small improvement in the overall BLEU score of Swedish-Bulgarian translation is achieved on the second enlargement stage. We find that both improvements justify further research into the method for the Swedish-Bulgarian translation task."
}