SMT error analysis and mapping to syntactic, semantic and structural fixes

This paper argues in favor of a linguisticallyinformed error classification for SMT to identify system weaknesses and map them to possible syntactic, semantic and structural fixes. We propose a scheme which includes both linguistic-oriented error categories as well as SMT-oriented edit errors, and evaluate an English-Spanish system and an English Basque system developed for a Q&A scenario in the IT domain. The classification, in our use-scenario, reveals great potential for fixes from lexical semantics techniques involving entity handling for IT-related names and user interface strings, word sense disambiguation for terminology, as well as argument structure for prepositions and syntactic parsing for various levels of reordering.