Statistical Machine Translation of Australian Aboriginal Languages: Morphological Analysis with Languages of Differing Morphological Richness
Simon Zwarts, Mark Dras · 2007
Morphological analysis is often used during preprocessing in Statistical Machine Trans-lation. Existing work suggests that the bene-fit would be greater for more highly inflected languages, although to our knowledge this has not been systematically tested on lan-guages with comparable morphology. In this paper, two comparable languages with different amounts of inflection are tested, to see if the benefits of morphology used during the translation process, depends on the morphological richness of the language. For this work we use indigenous Australian languages: most Australian Aboriginal lan-guages are highly inflected, where words can take a considerable number of post-fixes when compared to Indo-European lan-guages, and for languages in the same (Pama Nyungan) family, the morphological sys-tem works similarly. We show in this pre-liminary work that morphological analysis clearly benefits the richer of the two lan-guages investigated, but is more equivocal in the case of the other. 1