English-Latvian SMT: the challenge of translating into a free word order language

This paper presents a comparative study of two approaches to statistical machine translation (SMT) and their application to a task of English-to-Latvian translation, which is still an open research line in the field of automatic translation. We consider a state-of-the-art phrase-based SMT and an alternative N-gram-based SMT systems. The major differences between these two approaches lie in the distinct representations of bilingual units, which are the components of the bilingual model driving translation process and in the statistical modeling of the translation context. Latvian being a rather free word order language implies additional difficulties to the translation process. We contrast different reordering models and investigate how well they deal with the word ordering issue. Moving beyond automatic scores of translation quality that are classically presented in MT research papers, we contribute presenting a manual error analysis of MT systems output that helps to shed light on advantages and disadvantages of the SMT systems under consideration and identify the most prominent source of errors typical for both SMT systems.Postprint (published version

An English-to-Turkish interlingual MT system

This paper describes the integration of a Turkish generation system with the KANT knowledge-based machine translation system to produce a prototype English-Turkish interlingua-based machine translation system. These two independently constructed systems were successfully integrated within a period of two months, through development of a module which maps KANT interlingua expressions to Turkish syntactic structures. The combined system is able to translate completely and correctly 44 of 52 benchmark sentences in the domain of broadcast news captions. This study is the first known application of knowledge-based machine translation from English to Turkish, and our initial results show promise for future development. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1998

Design and Implementation of a Tactical Generator for Turkish, a Free Constituent Order Language

This thesis describes a tactical generator for Turkish, a free constituent order language, in which the order of the constituents may change according to the information structure of the sentences to be generated. In the absence of any information regarding the information structure of a sentence (i.e., topic, focus, background, etc.), the constituents of the sentence obey a default order, but the order is almost freely changeable, depending on the constraints of the text flow or discourse. We have used a recursively structured finite state machine for handling the changes in constituent order, implemented as a right-linear grammar backbone. Our implementation environment is the GenKit system, developed at Carnegie Mellon University--Center for Machine Translation. Morphological realization has been implemented using an external morphological analysis/generation component which performs concrete morpheme selection and handles morphographemic processes.Comment: M.Sc. Thesis submitted to the Department of Computer Engineering and Information Science, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. 146 pages (including title pages). Also available as: ftp://ftp.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/pub/tech-reports/1996/BU-CEIS-9614.ps.