Synthesizing Compound Words for Machine Translation
Austin Matthews, Eva Schlinger, Alon Lavie, Chris Dyer · 2016
Most machine translation systems construct translations from a closed vocabulary of target word forms, posing problems for translating into languages that have productive compounding processes.We present a simple and effective approach that deals with this problem in two phases.First, we build a classifier that identifies spans of the input text that can be translated into a single compound word in the target language.Then, for each identified span, we generate a pool of possible compounds which are added to the translation model as "synthetic" phrase translations.Experiments reveal that (i) we can effectively predict what spans can be compounded; (ii) our compound generation model produces good compounds; and (iii) modest improvements are possible in end-to-end English-German and English-Finnish translation tasks.We additionally introduce KomposEval, a new multi-reference dataset of English phrases and their translations into German compounds.