Modeling Inflection and Word-Formation in SMT
Alexander Fraser, Marion Weller, Aoife Cahill, Fabienne Cap · Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics · 2012
The current state-of-the-art in statistical machine translation (SMT) suffers from issues of sparsity and inadequate modeling power when translating into morphologically rich languages. We model both inflection and word-formation for the task of translating into German. We translate from English words to an underspecified German representation and then use linear-chain CRFs to predict the fully specified German representation. We show that improved modeling of inflection and wordformation leads to improved SMT.