Experiments on domain adaptation for English-Hindi SMT

Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems are usually trained on large amounts of bilingual text and monolingual target language text. If a significant amount of out-of-domain data is added to the training data, the quality of translation can drop. On the other hand, training an SMT system on a small amount of training material for given indomain data leads to narrow lexical coverage which again results in a low translation quality. In this paper, (i) we explore domain-adaptation techniques to combine large out-of-domain training data with small-scale in-domain training data for English—Hindi statistical machine translation and (ii) we cluster large out-of-domain training data to extract sentences similar to in-domain sentences and apply adaptation techniques to combine clustered sub-corpora with in-domain training data into a unified framework, achieving a 0.44 absolute corresponding to a 4.03% relative improvement in terms of BLEU over the baseline

Towards using web-crawled data for domain adaptation in statistical machine translation

This paper reports on the ongoing work focused on domain adaptation of statistical machine translation using domain-specific data obtained by domain-focused web crawling. We present a strategy for crawling monolingual and parallel data and their exploitation for testing, language modelling, and system tuning in a phrase--based machine translation framework. The proposed approach is evaluated on the domains of Natural Environment and Labour Legislation and two language pairs: English–French and English–Greek

Japanese/English Cross-Language Information Retrieval: Exploration of Query Translation and Transliteration

Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are in different languages, has of late become one of the major topics within the information retrieval community. This paper proposes a Japanese/English CLIR system, where we combine a query translation and retrieval modules. We currently target the retrieval of technical documents, and therefore the performance of our system is highly dependent on the quality of the translation of technical terms. However, the technical term translation is still problematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thus new terms are progressively created by combining existing base words. In addition, Japanese often represents loanwords based on its special phonogram. Consequently, existing dictionaries find it difficult to achieve sufficient coverage. To counter the first problem, we produce a Japanese/English dictionary for base words, and translate compound words on a word-by-word basis. We also use a probabilistic method to resolve translation ambiguity. For the second problem, we use a transliteration method, which corresponds words unlisted in the base word dictionary to their phonetic equivalents in the target language. We evaluate our system using a test collection for CLIR, and show that both the compound word translation and transliteration methods improve the system performance