Dictionary of Multiword Expressions for Translation into highly Inflected Languages

Daiga Deksne, Raivis Skadiņš, Inguna Skadiņa

Abstract
Treatment of Multiword Expressions (MWEs) is one of the most complicated issues in natural language processing, especially in Machine Translation (MT). The paper presents dictionary of MWEs for a English-Latvian MT system, demonstrating a way how MWEs could be handled for inflected languages with rich morphology and rather free word order. The proposed dictionary of MWEs consists of two constituents: a lexicon of phrases and a set of MWE rules. The lexicon of phrases is rather similar to translation lexicon of the MT system, while MWE rules describe syntactic structure of the source and target sentence allowing correct transformation of different MWE types into the target language and ensuring correct syntactic structure. The paper demonstrates this approach on different MWE types, starting from simple syntactic structures, followed by more complicated cases and including fully idiomatic expressions. Automatic evaluation shows that the described approach increases the quality of translation by 0.6 BLEU points.
Anthology ID:
L08-1259
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/353_paper.pdf
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Daiga Deksne, Raivis Skadiņš, and Inguna Skadiņa. 2008. Dictionary of Multiword Expressions for Translation into highly Inflected Languages. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Dictionary of Multiword Expressions for Translation into highly Inflected Languages (Deksne et al., LREC 2008)
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http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/353_paper.pdf
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