Taste of Two Different Flavours: Which Manipuri Script works better for English-Manipuri Language pair SMT Systems?

The statistical machine translation (SMT) system heavily depends on the sentence aligned parallel corpus and the target language model. This paper points out some of the core issues on switching a language script and its repercussion in the phrase based statistical machine translation system development. The present task reports on the outcome of EnglishManipuri language pair phrase based SMT task on two aspects – a) Manipuri using Bengali script, b) Manipuri using transliterated Meetei Mayek script. Two independent views on Bengali script based SMT and transliterated Meitei Mayek based SMT systems of the training data and language models are presented and compared. The impact of various language models is commendable in such scenario. The BLEU and NIST score shows that Bengali script based phrase based SMT (PBSMT) outperforms over the Meetei Mayek based English to Manipuri SMT system. However, subjective evaluation shows slight variation against the automatic scores.