Modeling verbal inflection for English to German SMT
نویسندگان
چکیده
German verbal inflection is frequently wrong in standard statistical machine translation approaches. German verbs agree with subjects in person and number, and they bear information about mood and tense. For subject–verb agreement, we parse German MT output to identify subject–verb pairs and ensure that the verb agrees with the subject. We show that this approach improves subject-verb agreement. We model tense/mood translation from English to German by means of a statistical classification model. Although our model shows good results on wellformed data, it does not systematically improve tense and mood in MT output. Reasons include the need for discourse knowledge, dependency on the domain, and stylistic variety in how tense/mood is translated. We present a thorough analysis of these problems.
منابع مشابه
Modeling Inflection and Word-Formation in SMT
The current state-of-the-art in statistical machine translation (SMT) suffers from issues of sparsity and inadequate modeling power when translating into morphologically rich languages. We model both inflection and word-formation for the task of translating into German. We translate from English words to an underspecified German representation and then use linearchain CRFs to predict the fully ...
متن کاملDetermining the placement of German verbs in English-to-German SMT
When translating English to German, existing reordering models often cannot model the long-range reorderings needed to generate German translations with verbs in the correct position. We reorder English as a preprocessing step for English-to-German SMT. We use a sequence of hand-crafted reordering rules applied to English parse trees. The reordering rules place English verbal elements in the po...
متن کاملMorphological Generation of German for SMT
We participated in the ACL WMT 2009 shared task for translation of German to English, and English to German. We used the Moses open source system, combined with morphological processing. For German to English, we had the only constraint system comparable with the open-data systems. One of the reasons the system performed well was strong reduction of the German vocabulary, through a simplistic c...
متن کاملInflection and Movement in Old English
Rich verbal inflection has been argued (a) to license pro-drop (e.g. Safir 1985); (b) to be connected to overt Verb-second (Platzack & Holmberg 1989; van Gelderen 1993; Roberts 1996); and (c) to activate the AGR(eement) and T(ense) positions (Bobaljik & Jonas 1996). The connections in (b) and (c) follow if one assumes that the relationship between morphology and syntax is a direct one: elements...
متن کاملA cross-linguistic look at VP-ellipsis and verbal speech errors
This paper argues that consideration of spontaneous speech errors provides insight into cross-linguistic analyses of syntactic phenomena. In particular, I claim that differences in the distribution of non-parallel VP-Ellipsis constructions in English and German, as well as variation in the spontaneously-occurring verbal speech errors, is explained by a parametric analysis of variation in the in...
متن کامل