Empircal dependency-based head finalization for statistical Chinese-, English-, and French-to-Myanmar (Burmese) machine translation

Chenchen Ding, Ye Kyaw Thu, Masao Utiyama, Andrew Finch, Eiichiro Sumita


Abstract
We conduct dependency-based head finalization for statistical machine translation (SMT) for Myanmar (Burmese). Although Myanmar is an understudied language, linguistically it is a head-final language with similar syntax to Japanese and Korean. So, applying the efficient techniques of Japanese and Korean processing to Myanmar is a natural idea. Our approach is a combination of two approaches. The first is a head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) based head finalization for English-to-Japanese translation, the second is dependency-based pre-ordering originally designed for English-to-Korean translation. We experiment on Chinese-, English-, and French-to-Myanmar translation, using a statistical pre-ordering approach as a comparison method. Experimental results show the dependency-based head finalization was able to consistently improve a baseline SMT system, for different source languages and different segmentation schemes for the Myanmar language.
Anthology ID:
2014.iwslt-papers.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers
Month:
December 4-5
Year:
2014
Address:
Lake Tahoe, California
Editors:
Marcello Federico, Sebastian Stüker, François Yvon
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
Note:
Pages:
184–191
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2014.iwslt-papers.5
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Chenchen Ding, Ye Kyaw Thu, Masao Utiyama, Andrew Finch, and Eiichiro Sumita. 2014. Empircal dependency-based head finalization for statistical Chinese-, English-, and French-to-Myanmar (Burmese) machine translation. In Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers, pages 184–191, Lake Tahoe, California.
Cite (Informal):
Empircal dependency-based head finalization for statistical Chinese-, English-, and French-to-Myanmar (Burmese) machine translation (Ding et al., IWSLT 2014)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2014.iwslt-papers.5.pdf