Abstract
There are additional difficulties associated with the translation of language pairs that have different word orders. In this chapter, we introduce some of these difficulties and describe two syntax-based approaches to addressing these problems. First, we describe an approach that exploits regularities in the differences of phrase head locations between Chinese and Japanese and formalize rules that reorder branches of constituency trees. Second, we propose an approach that compensates the differences in typical locations of the Subject (S), the Verb (V), and the Object (O) between Chinese (SVO) and Japanese (SOV), and devise rules that reorder word blocks from dependency trees. These approaches are implemented in the form of pre-reordering methods, and we evaluate their impact on a phrase-based machine translation system in terms of translation quality in news and patent domains. These approaches rely on syntactic structures that are automatically extracted by means of parsers, and as such, they are sensitive to parse errors. We analyze the effect of these parse errors, and obtain upper bounds in translation performance that can be achieved with these syntax-based pre-reordering methods.
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Notes
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They produce target phrases that correspond to source phrases at a very different relative position.
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In the text, we represent Chinese characters in Pinyin together with a tone number and its English translation in parentheses, e.g., 我(wo3, I). In total, there are 5 tones (i.e., 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4) in Chinese.
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However, it is still open for debate whether Chinese is a head-initial or a head-final language due to its flexible word order (Gao 2008). Nevertheless, the written form of Chinese behaves primarily as a head-initial language.
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Han, D., Martínez-Gómez, P., Miyao, Y. (2016). Syntax-Based Pre-reordering for Chinese-to-Japanese Statistical Machine Translation. In: Costa-jussà, M., Rapp, R., Lambert, P., Eberle, K., Banchs, R., Babych, B. (eds) Hybrid Approaches to Machine Translation. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21311-8_4
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