Bootstrapping Arabic-Italian SMT through Comparable Texts and Pivot Translation
Mauro Cettolo, Nicola Bertoldi, Marcello Federico · 2011
This paper describes efforts towards the development of an Arabic to Italian SMT system for the news domain. Since only very little parallel data are available for this language pair, we investigated both the exploitation of comparable corpora and pivot translation. Experimental evaluation was conducted on a new benchmark devel-oped by extending two Arabic-to-English NIST evaluation sets. Preliminary results show potentials of both approaches with respect to performance achieved by a pop-ular state-of-the-art Web-based translation service. 1