Hybrid Statistical Machine Translation for English-Myanmar: UTYCC Submission to WAT-2021

Ye Kyaw Thu, Thazin Myint Oo, Hlaing Myat Nwe, Khaing Zar Mon, Nang Aeindray Kyaw, Naing Linn Phyo, Nann Hwan Khun, Hnin Aye Thant


Abstract
In this paper we describe our submissions to WAT-2021 (Nakazawa et al., 2021) for English-to-Myanmar language (Burmese) task. Our team, ID: “YCC-MT1”, focused on bringing transliteration knowledge to the decoder without changing the model. We manually extracted the transliteration word/phrase pairs from the ALT corpus and applying XML markup feature of Moses decoder (i.e. -xml-input exclusive, -xml-input inclusive). We demonstrate that hybrid translation technique can significantly improve (around 6 BLEU scores) the baseline of three well-known “Phrase-based SMT”, “Operation Sequence Model” and “Hierarchical Phrase-based SMT”. Moreover, this simple hybrid method achieved the second highest results among the submitted MT systems for English-to-Myanmar WAT2021 translation share task according to BLEU (Papineni et al., 2002) and AMFM scores (Banchs et al., 2015).
Anthology ID:
2021.wat-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Toshiaki Nakazawa, Hideki Nakayama, Isao Goto, Hideya Mino, Chenchen Ding, Raj Dabre, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Shohei Higashiyama, Hiroshi Manabe, Win Pa Pa, Shantipriya Parida, Ondřej Bojar, Chenhui Chu, Akiko Eriguchi, Kaori Abe, Yusuke Oda, Katsuhito Sudoh, Sadao Kurohashi, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Venue:
WAT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
83–89
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wat-1.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.wat-1.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ye Kyaw Thu, Thazin Myint Oo, Hlaing Myat Nwe, Khaing Zar Mon, Nang Aeindray Kyaw, Naing Linn Phyo, Nann Hwan Khun, and Hnin Aye Thant. 2021. Hybrid Statistical Machine Translation for English-Myanmar: UTYCC Submission to WAT-2021. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT2021), pages 83–89, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hybrid Statistical Machine Translation for English-Myanmar: UTYCC Submission to WAT-2021 (Thu et al., WAT 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wat-1.7.pdf