Overcoming statistical machine translation limitations: error analysis and proposed solutions for the Catalan-Spanish language pair

This work aims to improve an N-gram-based statistical machine translation system between the Catalan and Spanish languages, trained with an aligned Spanish-Catalan parallel corpus consisting of 1.7 million sentences taken from El Periódico newspaper. Starting from a linguistic error analysis above t...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Farrús, Mireia, Costa Jussà, Marta R., Mariño, José B., Poch Riera, Marc, Hernández Huerta, Adolfo, Henríquez, Carlos, Rodríguez Fonollosa, José A.
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2011
País:España
Institución:Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)
Repositorio:O2, repositorio institucional de la UOC
OAI Identifier:oai:openaccess.uoc.edu:10609/109799
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10609/109799
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:statistical machine translation
n-gram-based translation
linguistic knowledge
grammatical categories
traducción automática estadística
traducción basada en n-gramas
conocimientos lingüísticos
categorías gramaticales
traducció automàtica estadística
traducció basada en n-grames
coneixements lingüístics
categories gramaticals
Machine translating
Traducció automàtica
Traducción automática
Descripción
Sumario:This work aims to improve an N-gram-based statistical machine translation system between the Catalan and Spanish languages, trained with an aligned Spanish-Catalan parallel corpus consisting of 1.7 million sentences taken from El Periódico newspaper. Starting from a linguistic error analysis above this baseline system, orthographic, morphological, lexical, semantic and syntactic problems are approached using a set of techniques. The proposed solutions include the development and application of additional statistical techniques, text pre- and post-processing tasks, and rules based on the use of grammatical categories, as well as lexical categorization. The performance of the improved system is clearly increased, as is shown in both human and automatic evaluations of the system, with a gain of about 1.1 points BLEU observed in the Spanish-to-Catalan direction of translation, and a gain of about 0.5 points in the reverse direction. The final system is freely available online as a linguistic resource.