GRAFIX: Automated Rule-Based Post Editing System to Improve English-Persian SMT Output

This paper describes the latest developments in the PeEn-SMT system, specifically covering experiments with Grafix, an APE component developed for PeEn-SMT. The success of well-designed SMT systems has made this approach one of the most popular MT approaches. However, MT output is often seriously grammatically incorrect. This is more prevalent in SMT since this approach is not language-specific. This system works with Persian, a morphologically rich language, so post-editing output is an important step in maintaining translation fluency. Grafix performs a range of corrections on sentences, from lexical transformation to complex syntactical rearrangement. It analyzes the target sentence (the SMT output in Persian language) and attempts to correct it by applying a number of rules which enforce consistency with Persian grammar. We show that the proposed system is able to improve the quality of the state-of-the-art EnglishPersian SMT systems, yielding promising results from both automatic and manual evaluation techniques.