Combining Linguistic and Statistical Methods for Bi-directional English Chinese Translation in the Flight Domain

Stephanie Seneff, Chao Wang, John Lee


Abstract
In this paper, we discuss techniques to combine an interlingua translation framework with phrase-based statistical methods, for translation from Chinese into English. Our goal is to achieve high-quality translation, suitable for use in language tutoring applications. We explore these ideas in the context of a flight domain, for which we have a large corpus of English queries, obtained from users interacting with a dialogue system. Our techniques exploit a pre-existing English-to-Chinese translation system to automatically produce a synthetic bilingual corpus. Several experiments were conducted combining linguistic and statistical methods, and manual evaluation was conducted for a set of 460 Chinese sentences. The best performance achieved an “adequate” or better analysis (3 or above rating) on nearly 94% of the 409 parsable subset. Using a Rover scheme to combine four systems resulted in an “adequate or better” rating for 88% of all the utterances.
Anthology ID:
2006.amta-papers.24
Volume:
Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers
Month:
August 8-12
Year:
2006
Address:
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Venue:
AMTA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Note:
Pages:
213–222
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2006.amta-papers.24
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Stephanie Seneff, Chao Wang, and John Lee. 2006. Combining Linguistic and Statistical Methods for Bi-directional English Chinese Translation in the Flight Domain. In Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers, pages 213–222, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
Combining Linguistic and Statistical Methods for Bi-directional English Chinese Translation in the Flight Domain (Seneff et al., AMTA 2006)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2006.amta-papers.24.pdf