Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean follow Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order, which is completely different from European languages such as English and French that follow Subject-Verb-Object word. The difference is not limited to the position of "Object" or the accusative case, and the former is also called head-final and the latter is also called head-initial. Because of the difference, phrasebased SMT between SVO and SOV does not work well. This talk introduces Head Finalization that reorders sentences into the head-final word order. According to the result of the NTCIR-9 workshop, Head Finalization was quite effective for English-to- Japanese patent translation.
Cite as: Isozaki, H. (2012) Head finalization: translation from SVO to SOV. Proc. International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2012), 10
@inproceedings{isozaki12_iwslt,
author={Hideki Isozaki},
title={{Head finalization: translation from SVO to SOV}},
year=2012,
booktitle={Proc. International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2012)},
pages={10}
}