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

This work aims to improve anN-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: Mariño Acebal, José Bernardo|||0000-0002-9471-8675, Farrús Cabeceran, Mireia, Ruiz Costa-Jussà, Marta|||0000-0002-5703-520X, Poch, Marc, Hernández Huerta, Adolfo, Herníquez, Carlos, Rodríguez Fonollosa, José Adrián|||0000-0001-9513-7939
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2011
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/12676
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/12676
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10579-011-9137-0
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Statistical machine translation
N-gram-based translation
Linguistic knowledge
Grammatical categories
Signal theory (Telecommunication)
Language and Speech Technologies
Parla
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Enginyeria de la telecomunicació
Descripción
Sumario:This work aims to improve anN-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