Abstract
This paper presents a wide range of statistical word alignment experiments incorporating morphosyntactic information. By means of parallel corpus transformations according to information of POS-tagging, lemmatization or stemming, we explore which linguistic information helps improve alignment error rates. For this, evaluation against a human word alignment reference is performed, aiming at an improved machine translation training scheme which eventually leads to improved SMT performance. Experiments are carried out in a Spanish–English European Parliament Proceedings parallel corpus, both in a large and a small data track. As expected, improvements due to introducing morphosyntactic information are bigger in case of data scarcity, but significant improvement is also achieved in a large data task, meaning that certain linguistic knowledge is relevant even in situations of large data availability.
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de Gispert, A. et al. (2006). Improving Statistical Word Alignments with Morpho-syntactic Transformations. In: Salakoski, T., Ginter, F., Pyysalo, S., Pahikkala, T. (eds) Advances in Natural Language Processing. FinTAL 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4139. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11816508_38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11816508_38
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