Maulik Shah


2017

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Utilizing Lexical Similarity between Related, Low-resource Languages for Pivot-based SMT
Anoop Kunchukuttan | Maulik Shah | Pradyot Prakash | Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We investigate pivot-based translation between related languages in a low resource, phrase-based SMT setting. We show that a subword-level pivot-based SMT model using a related pivot language is substantially better than word and morpheme-level pivot models. It is also highly competitive with the best direct translation model, which is encouraging as no direct source-target training corpus is used. We also show that combining multiple related language pivot models can rival a direct translation model. Thus, the use of subwords as translation units coupled with multiple related pivot languages can compensate for the lack of a direct parallel corpus.