Combining Linguistic and Statistical Methods for Bi-directional English Chinese Translation in the Flight Domain
Stephanie Seneff, Chao Wang, John Lee · 2006
In this paper, we discuss techniques to combine an interlingua translation frame-work with phrase-based statistical meth-ods, for translation from Chinese into En-glish. Our goal is to achieve high-quality translation, suitable for use in language tutoring applications. We explore these ideas in the context of a flight domain, for which we have a large corpus of English queries, obtained from users interacting with a dialogue system. Our techniques exploit a pre-existing English-to-Chinese translation system to automatically pro-duce a synthetic bilingual corpus. Sev-eral experiments were conducted combin-ing linguistic and statistical methods, and manual evaluation was conducted for a set of 460 Chinese sentences. The best per-formance achieved an “adequate ” or better analysis (3 or above rating) on nearly 94% of the 409 parsable subset. Using a Rover scheme to combine four systems resulted in an “adequate or better ” rating for 88% of all the utterances.