English to Chinese Translation: How Chinese Character Matters

Word segmentation is helpful in Chinese natural language processing in many aspects. However it is showed that different word segmentation strategies do not affect the performance of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) from English to Chinese significantly. In addition, it will cause some confusions in the evaluation of English to Chinese SMT. So we make an empirical attempt to translation English to Chinese in the character level, in both the alignment model and language model. A series of empirical comparison experiments have been conducted to show how different factors affect the performance of character-level English to Chinese SMT. We also apply the recent popular continuous space language model into English to Chinese SMT. The best performance is obtained with the BLEU score 41.56, which improve baseline system (40.31) by around 1.2 BLEU score. ∗Correspondence author. †Thank all the reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions on our paper. This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61170114, and No. 61272248), the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2013CB329401), the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (No. 13511500200), the European Union Seventh Framework Program (No. 247619), the Cai Yuanpei Program (CSC fund 201304490199 and 201304490171), and the art and science interdiscipline funds of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No. 14X190040031, and the Key Project of National Society Science Foundation of China, No. 15-ZDA041.