Machine Translation between Hebrew and Arabic: Needs, Challenges and Preliminary Solutions

Reshef Shilon, Nizar Habash, Alon Lavie, Shuly Wintner


Abstract
Hebrew and Arabic are related but mutually incomprehensible languages with complex morphology and scarce parallel corpora. Machine translation between the two languages is therefore interesting and challenging. We discuss similarities and differences between Hebrew and Arabic, the benefits and challenges that they induce, respectively, and their implications for machine translation. We highlight the shortcomings of using English as a pivot language and advocate a direct, transfer-based and linguistically-informed (but still statistical, and hence scalable) approach. We report preliminary results of such a system that we are currently developing.
Anthology ID:
2010.amta-srw.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Student Research Workshop
Month:
October 31-November 4
Year:
2010
Address:
Denver, Colorado, USA
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AMTA
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Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2010.amta-srw.4
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Cite (ACL):
Reshef Shilon, Nizar Habash, Alon Lavie, and Shuly Wintner. 2010. Machine Translation between Hebrew and Arabic: Needs, Challenges and Preliminary Solutions. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Student Research Workshop, Denver, Colorado, USA. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
Machine Translation between Hebrew and Arabic: Needs, Challenges and Preliminary Solutions (Shilon et al., AMTA 2010)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2010.amta-srw.4.pdf