Bootstrapping Arabic-Italian SMT through Comparable Texts and Pivot Translation
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Abstract
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
developed by extending two Arabic-to-English NIST evaluation sets with Italian and French
translations, produced from the source language by experts. Preliminary results show potentials of
both approaches with respect to performance achieved by a popular state-of-the-art
Web-based translation service