Login (DCU Staff Only)
Login (DCU Staff Only)

DORAS | DCU Research Repository

Explore open access research and scholarly works from DCU

Advanced Search

Improving subject-verb agreement in SMT

Vanmassenhove, Eva orcid logoORCID: 0000-0003-1162-820X, Du, Jinhua orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-3267-4881 and Way, Andy orcid logoORCID: 0000-0001-5736-5930 (2016) Improving subject-verb agreement in SMT. In: Fifth Workshop on Hybrid Approaches to Translation (HyTra), 1 June 2016, Riga, Latvia.

Abstract
Ensuring agreement between the subject and the main verb is crucial for the correctness of the information that a sentence conveys. While generating correct subject-verb agreement is relatively straightforward in rule-based approaches to Machine Translation (RBMT), today’s leading statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems often fail to generate correct subject-verb agreements, especially when the target language is morphologically richer than the source language. The main problem is that one surface verb form in the source language corresponds to many surface verb forms in the target language. To deal with subject-verb agreement we built a hybrid SMT system that augments source verbs with extra linguistic information drawn from their source-language context. This information, in the form of labels attached to verbs that indicate person and number, creates a closer association between a verb from the source and a verb in the target language. We used our preprocessing approach on English as source language and built an SMT system for translation to French. In a range of experiments, the results show improvements in translation quality for our augmented SMT system over a Moses baseline engine, on both automatic and manual evaluations, for the majority of cases where the subject-verb agreement was previously incorrectly translated.
Metadata
Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:Conference
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:Subject-Verb Agreement; Statistical Machine Translation; Hybrid MT; Source-Language Preprocessing
Subjects:Computer Science > Machine learning
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Research Institutes and Centres > ADAPT
Published in: Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Hybrid Approaches to Translation (HyTra). .
Official URL:https://hyghtra.eu/wshytra5.html
Copyright Information:© 2016 The Authors
Use License:This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. View License
ID Code:23237
Deposited On:02 May 2019 14:42 by Thomas Murtagh . Last Modified 06 Jul 2020 14:12
Documents

Full text available as:

[thumbnail of Improving Subject-Verb Agreement in SMT.pdf]
Preview
PDF - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
154kB
Downloads

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Archive Staff Only: edit this record