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Improving Word Alignment with Bridge Languages

Shankar Kumar
Franz Och
Wolfgang Macherey
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning, Association for Computational Linguistics, 209 N. Eighth Street, East Stroudsburg, PA, USA (2007)
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Abstract

We describe an approach to improve Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) performance using multi-lingual, parallel, sentence-aligned corpora in several bridge languages. Our approach consists of a simple method for utilizing a bridge language to create a word alignment system and a procedure for combining word alignment systems from multiple bridge languages. The final translation is obtained by consensus decoding that combines hypotheses obtained using all bridge language word alignments. We present experiments showing that multilingual, parallel text in Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese can be utilized in this framework to improve translation performance on an Arabic-to-English task.

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