Generating Chinese couplets using a statistical MT approach
Long Jiang, Ming Zhou · 2008
Part of the unique cultural heritage of China is the game of Chinese couplets (duì liá n).One person challenges the other person with a sentence (first sentence).The other person then replies with a sentence (second sentence) equal in length and word segmentation, in a way that corresponding words in the two sentences match each other by obeying certain constraints on semantic, syntactic, and lexical relatedness.This task is viewed as a difficult problem in AI and has not been explored in the research community.In this paper, we regard this task as a kind of machine translation process.We present a phrase-based SMT approach to generate the second sentence.First, the system takes as input the first sentence, and generates as output an N-best list of proposed second sentences, using a phrase-based SMT decoder.Then, a set of filters is used to remove candidates violating linguistic constraints.Finally, a Ranking SVM is applied to rerank the candidates.A comprehensive evaluation, using both human judgments and BLEU scores, has been conducted, and the results demonstrate that this approach is very successful.海 阔 凭 鱼 跃 sea wide allow fish jump