EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

Example-Based Bi-Directional Chinese-English Machine Translation with Semi-Automatically Induced Grammars

K.C. Siu, Helen M. Meng, C.C. Wong

Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

We have previously developed a framework for bi-directional English-to-Chinese/Chinese-to-English machine translation using semi-automatically induced grammars from unannotated corpora. The framework adopts an example-based machine translation (EBMT) approach. This work reports on three extensions to the framework. First, we investigate the comparative merits of three distance metrics (Kullback-Leibler, Manhattan-Norm and Gini Index) for agglomerative clustering in grammar induction. Second, we seek an automatic evaluation method that can also consider multiple translation outputs generated for a single input sentence based on the BLEU metric. Third, our previous investigation shows that Chinese-to-English translation has lower performance due to incorrect use of English inflectional forms - a consequence of random selection among translation alternatives. We present an improved selection strategy that leverages information from the example parse trees in our EBMT paradigm.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Siu, K.C. / Meng, Helen M. / Wong, C.C. (2003): "Example-based bi-directional Chinese-English machine translation with semi-automatically induced grammars", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 2801-2804.