Simple Syntactic and Morphological Processing Can Help English-Hindi Statistical Machine Translation.
Ananthakrishnan Ramanathan, Jayprasad Hegde, Ritesh Shah, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, M. Sasikumar · 2008
In this paper, we report our work on incor-porating syntactic and morphological infor-mation for English to Hindi statistical ma-chine translation. Two simple and compu-tationally inexpensive ideas have proven to be surprisingly effective: (i) reordering the English source sentence as per Hindi syntax, and (ii) using the suffixes of Hindi words. The former is done by applying simple trans-formation rules on the English parse tree. The latter, by using a simple suffix separa-tion program. With only a small amount of bilingual training data and limited tools for Hindi, we achieve reasonable performance and substantial improvements over the base-line phrase-based system. Our approach es-chews the use of parsing or other sophisti-cated linguistic tools for the target language (Hindi) making it a useful framework for statistical machine translation from English to Indian languages in general, since such tools are not widely available for Indian lan-guages currently. 1