Word Alignment for English-Turkish Language Pair

Mehmet Talha Çakmak, Süleyman Acar, Gülşen Eryiğit

Abstract
Word alignment is an important step for machine translation systems. Although the alignment performance between grammatically similar languages is reported to be very high in many studies, the case is not the same for language pairs from different language families. In this study, we are focusing on English-Turkish language pairs. Turkish is a highly agglutinative language with a very productive and rich morphology whereas English has a very poor morphology when compared to this language. As a result of this, one Turkish word is usually aligned with several English words. The traditional models which use word-level alignment approaches generally fail in such circumstances. In this study, we evaluate a Giza++ system by splitting the words into their morphological units (stem and suffixes) and compare the model with the traditional one. For the first time, we evaluate the performance of our aligner on gold standard parallel sentences rather than in a real machine translation system. Our approach reduced the alignment error rate by 40% relative. Finally, a new test corpus of 300 manually aligned sentences is released together with this study.
Anthology ID:
L12-1191
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2177–2180
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/380_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mehmet Talha Çakmak, Süleyman Acar, and Gülşen Eryiğit. 2012. Word Alignment for English-Turkish Language Pair. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 2177–2180, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Word Alignment for English-Turkish Language Pair (Çakmak et al., LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/380_Paper.pdf
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