Statistical Machine Translation: Little Changes Big Impacts

In this paper we describe some experiments carried out to test the impact of automatic casing and punctuation changes when training and testing statistical translation models. The experiments described here concern the translation from/to English and Brazilian Portuguese texts but since the superfic...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Caseli, H M, Nunes, I A
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Automatic testing
Brazilian Portuguese
Computer science
English
Humans
Natural language processing
Natural languages
NIST
Performance evaluation
Probability
Proposals
statistical machine translation
superficial changes
Surface-mount technology
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In this paper we describe some experiments carried out to test the impact of automatic casing and punctuation changes when training and testing statistical translation models. The experiments described here concern the translation from/to English and Brazilian Portuguese texts but since the superficial changes investigated are language independent, we believe that the conclusions can be applied to many other pairs of languages. These experiments were designed aiming at setting a baseline scenario for future training and testing of more complex statistical translation models such as the factored ones. From the experiments presented here it is possible to see that case and punctuation changes have a significant impact on automatic translation results.
DOI:10.1109/STIL.2009.24