Detecting Document-level Context Triggers to Resolve Translation Ambiguity
Laura Mascarell, Mark Fishel, Martin Volk · 2015
Most current machine translation systems translate each sentence independently, ignoring the context from previous sentences. This discourse unawareness can lead to incorrect translation of words or phrases that are ambiguous in the sentence. For example, the German term Typen in the phrase diese Typen can be translated either into English types or guys. However, knowing that it co-refers to the compound K¨ (“body types”) in the previous sentence helps to disambiguate the term and translate it into types. We propose a method of automatically detecting document-level trigger words (like K¨ orpertypen), whose presence helps to disambiguate translations of ambiguous terms. In this preliminary study we analyze the method and its limitations, and outline future work directions.