Discovery of Discourse-Related Language Contrasts through Alignment Discrepancies in English-German Translation

Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Christian Hardmeier


Abstract
In this paper, we analyse alignment discrepancies for discourse structures in English-German parallel data – sentence pairs, in which discourse structures in target or source texts have no alignment in the corresponding parallel sentences. The discourse-related structures are designed in form of linguistic patterns based on the information delivered by automatic part-of-speech and dependency annotation. In addition to alignment errors (existing structures left unaligned), these alignment discrepancies can be caused by language contrasts or through the phenomena of explicitation and implicitation in the translation process. We propose a new approach including new type of resources for corpus-based language contrast analysis and apply it to study and classify the contrasts found in our English-German parallel corpus. As unaligned discourse structures may also result in the loss of discourse information in the MT training data, we hope to deliver information in support of discourse-aware machine translation (MT).
Anthology ID:
W17-4810
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Discourse in Machine Translation
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Andrei Popescu-Belis, Jörg Tiedemann
Venue:
DiscoMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
73–81
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-4810
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-4810
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski and Christian Hardmeier. 2017. Discovery of Discourse-Related Language Contrasts through Alignment Discrepancies in English-German Translation. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Discourse in Machine Translation, pages 73–81, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Discovery of Discourse-Related Language Contrasts through Alignment Discrepancies in English-German Translation (Lapshinova-Koltunski & Hardmeier, DiscoMT 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-4810.pdf