Communicating Unknown Words in Machine Translation

Matthias Eck, Stephan Vogel, Alex Waibel


Abstract
A new approach to handle unknown words in machine translation is presented. The basic idea is to find definitions for the unknown words on the source language side and translate those definitions instead. Only monolingual resources are required, which generally offer a broader coverage than bilingual resources and are available for a large number of languages. In order to use this in a machine translation system definitions are extracted automatically from online dictionaries and encyclopedias. The translated definition is then inserted and clearly marked in the original hypothesis. This is shown to lead to significant improvements in (subjective) translation quality.
Anthology ID:
L08-1487
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/392_paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matthias Eck, Stephan Vogel, and Alex Waibel. 2008. Communicating Unknown Words in Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Communicating Unknown Words in Machine Translation (Eck et al., LREC 2008)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/392_paper.pdf