Abstract
Errors in English parse trees impact the quality of syntax-based MT systems trained using those parses. Frequent sources of error for English parsers include PP-attachment ambiguity, NP-bracketing ambiguity, and coordination ambiguity. Not all ambiguities are preserved across languages. We examine a common type of ambiguity in English that is not preserved in Chinese: given a sequence “VP NP PP”, should the PP be attached to the main verb, or to the object noun phrase? We present a discriminative method for exploiting bilingual Chinese-English word alignments to resolve this ambiguity in English. On a held-out test set of Chinese-English parallel sentences, our method achieves 86.3% accuracy on this PP-attachment disambiguation task, an improvement of 4% over the accuracy of the baseline Collins parser (82.3%).- Anthology ID:
- 2008.amta-srw.2
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Student Research Workshop
- Month:
- October 21-25
- Year:
- 2008
- Address:
- Waikiki, USA
- Venue:
- AMTA
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
- Note:
- Pages:
- 245–253
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/tt-tag/2008.amta-srw.2/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Victoria Fossum and Kevin Knight. 2008. Using Bilingual Chinese-English Word Alignments to Resolve PP-attachment Ambiguity in English. In Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Student Research Workshop, pages 245–253, Waikiki, USA. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
- Cite (Informal):
- Using Bilingual Chinese-English Word Alignments to Resolve PP-attachment Ambiguity in English (Fossum & Knight, AMTA 2008)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/tt-tag/2008.amta-srw.2.pdf