Persian-Spanish Low-Resource Statistical Machine Translation Through English as Pivot Language

This paper is an attempt to exclusively focus on investigating the pivot language technique in which a bridging language is utilized to increase the quality of the Persian–Spanish low-resource Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). In this case, English is used as the bridging language, and the Persian–English SMT is combined with the English–Spanish one, where the relatively large corpora of each may be used in support of the Persian–Spanish pairing. Our results indicate that the pivot language technique outperforms the direct SMT processes currently in use between Persian and Spanish. Furthermore, we investigate the sentence translation pivot strategy and the phrase translation in turn, and demonstrate that, in the context of the Persian–Spanish SMT system, the phrase-level pivoting outperforms the sentence-level pivoting. Finally we suggest a method called combination model in which the standard direct model and the best triangulation pivoting model are blended in order to reach a high-quality translation.