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Case markers and morphology: addressing the crux of the fluency problem in English-Hindi SMT

Authors:

Ananthakrishnan Ramanathan,

Hansraj Choudhary,

Pushpak BhattacharyyaAuthors Info & Claims

ACL '09: Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP: Volume 2 - Volume 2

Pages 800 - 808

Published: 02 August 2009 Publication History

Abstract

We report in this paper our work on accurately generating case markers and suffixes in English-to-Hindi SMT. Hindi is a relatively free word-order language, and makes use of a comparatively richer set of case markers and morphological suffixes for correct meaning representation. From our experience of large-scale English-Hindi MT, we are convinced that fluency and fidelity in the Hindi output get an order of magnitude facelift if accurate case markers and suffixes are produced. Now, the moot question is: what entity on the English side encodes the information contained in case markers and suffixes on the Hindi side? Our studies of correspondences in the two languages show that case markers and suffixes in Hindi are predominantly determined by the combination of suffixes and semantic relations on the English side. We, therefore, augment the aligned corpus of the two languages, with the correspondence of English suffixes and semantic relations with Hindi suffixes and case markers. Our results on 400 test sentences, translated using an SMT system trained on around 13000 parallel sentences, show that suffix + semantic relation → case marker/suffix is a very useful translation factor, in the sense of making a significant difference to output quality as indicated by subjective evaluation as well as BLEU scores.

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Cited By

S SBhattacharyya P(2017)Role of Morphology Injection in SMTACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/312920817:1(1-31)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3129208
Sharma MSamanta D(2014)Word Prediction System for Text Entry in HindiACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing10.1145/261759013:2(1-29)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2617590
Tamchyna ABojar O(2013)No free lunch in factored phrase-based machine translationProceedings of the 14th international conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing - Volume 210.1007/978-3-642-37256-8_18(210-223)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-37256-8_18
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Case markers and morphology: addressing the crux of the fluency problem in English-Hindi SMT
1. Computing methodologies
2. Mathematics of computing
  1. Probability and statistics
    1. Statistical paradigms
      1. Statistical graphics

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ACL '09: Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP: Volume 2 - Volume 2

August 2009

595 pages

ISBN:9781932432466

General Chair:
Keh-Yih Su
Behavior Design Corp., Taiwan

Publisher

Association for Computational Linguistics

United States

Publication History

Published: 02 August 2009

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Cited By

S SBhattacharyya P(2017)Role of Morphology Injection in SMTACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/312920817:1(1-31)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3129208
Sharma MSamanta D(2014)Word Prediction System for Text Entry in HindiACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing10.1145/261759013:2(1-29)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2617590
Tamchyna ABojar O(2013)No free lunch in factored phrase-based machine translationProceedings of the 14th international conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing - Volume 210.1007/978-3-642-37256-8_18(210-223)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-37256-8_18
Bojar OJawaid BKamran A(2012)Probes in a taxonomy of factored phrase-based modelsProceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation10.5555/2393015.2393050(253-260)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2393015.2393050
Visweswariah KRajkumar RGandhe ARamanathan ANavratil JMerlo PBarzilay RJohnson M(2011)A word reordering model for improved machine translationProceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing10.5555/2145432.2145489(486-496)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2145432.2145489
Subotin MLin D(2011)An exponential translation model for target language morphologyProceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies - Volume 110.5555/2002472.2002502(230-238)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2002472.2002502
Clifton ASarkar ALin D(2011)Combining morpheme-based machine translation with post-processing morpheme predictionProceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies - Volume 110.5555/2002472.2002477(32-42)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2002472.2002477
Zeman D(2010)Using TectoMT as a preprocessing tool for phrase-based statistical machine translationProceedings of the 13th international conference on Text, speech and dialogue10.5555/1887176.1887206(216-223)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1887176.1887206

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