A Simple but Effective Approach to Improve Arabizi-to-English Statistical Machine Translation

Marlies van der Wees, Arianna Bisazza, Christof Monz


Abstract
A major challenge for statistical machine translation (SMT) of Arabic-to-English user-generated text is the prevalence of text written in Arabizi, or Romanized Arabic. When facing such texts, a translation system trained on conventional Arabic-English data will suffer from extremely low model coverage. In addition, Arabizi is not regulated by any official standardization and therefore highly ambiguous, which prevents rule-based approaches from achieving good translation results. In this paper, we improve Arabizi-to-English machine translation by presenting a simple but effective Arabizi-to-Arabic transliteration pipeline that does not require knowledge by experts or native Arabic speakers. We incorporate this pipeline into a phrase-based SMT system, and show that translation quality after automatically transliterating Arabizi to Arabic yields results that are comparable to those achieved after human transliteration.
Anthology ID:
W16-3908
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (WNUT)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Bo Han, Alan Ritter, Leon Derczynski, Wei Xu, Tim Baldwin
Venue:
WNUT
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
43–50
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-3908
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marlies van der Wees, Arianna Bisazza, and Christof Monz. 2016. A Simple but Effective Approach to Improve Arabizi-to-English Statistical Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (WNUT), pages 43–50, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
A Simple but Effective Approach to Improve Arabizi-to-English Statistical Machine Translation (van der Wees et al., WNUT 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-3908.pdf