Inductive Detection of Language Features via Clustering Minimal Pairs: Toward Feature-Rich Grammars in Machine Translation

Syntax-based Machine Translation systems have recently become a focus of research with much hope that they will outperform traditional Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PBSMT). Toward this goal, we present a method for analyzing the morphosyntactic content of language from an Elicitation Corpus such as the one included in the LDC’s upcoming LCTL language packs. The presented method discovers a mapping between morphemes and linguistically relevant features. By providing this tool that can augment structure-based MT models with these rich features, we believe the discriminative power of current models can be improved. We conclude by outlining how the resulting output can then be used in inducing a morphosyntactically feature-rich grammar for AVENUE, a modern syntax-based MT system.