Italian and Spanish Null Subjects. A Case Study Evaluation in an MT Perspective.

Lorenza Russo, Sharid Loáiciga, Asheesh Gulati


Abstract
Thanks to their rich morphology, Italian and Spanish allow pro-drop pronouns, i.e., non lexically-realized subject pronouns. Here we distinguish between two different types of null subjects: personal pro-drop and impersonal pro-drop. We evaluate the translation of these two categories into French, a non pro-drop language, using Its-2, a transfer-based system developed at our laboratory; and Moses, a statistical system. Three different corpora are used: two subsets of the Europarl corpus and a third corpus built using newspaper articles. Null subjects turn out to be quantitatively important in all three corpora, but their distribution varies depending on the language and the text genre though. From a MT perspective, translation results are determined by the type of pro-drop and the pair of languages involved. Impersonal pro-drop is harder to translate than personal pro-drop, especially for the translation from Italian into French, and a significant portion of incorrect translations consists of missing pronouns.
Anthology ID:
L12-1480
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1779–1784
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/813_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lorenza Russo, Sharid Loáiciga, and Asheesh Gulati. 2012. Italian and Spanish Null Subjects. A Case Study Evaluation in an MT Perspective.. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 1779–1784, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Italian and Spanish Null Subjects. A Case Study Evaluation in an MT Perspective. (Russo et al., LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/813_Paper.pdf