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Improving Arabic-Chinese statistical machine translation using English as pivot language

Published 1 January 2009Open access
Nizar Habash, Jun Hu
Citations51
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TL;DR

A comparison of two approaches for Arabic-Chinese machine translation using English as a pivot language: sentence pivoting and phrase-table pivoting shows that using Englishas a pivot in either approach outperforms direct translation from Arabic to Chinese.

Abstract

We present a comparison of two approaches for Arabic-Chinese machine translation using English as a pivot language: sentence pivoting and phrase-table pivoting. Our results show that using English as a pivot in either approach outperforms direct translation from Arabic to Chinese. Our best result is the phrase-pivot system which scores higher than direct translation by 1.1 BLEU points. An error analysis of our best system shows that we successfully handle many complex Arabic-Chinese syntactic variations.

Keywords

Computer ScienceBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology