Abstract
This paper describes a methodology for constructing aligned German-Chinese corpora from movie subtitles. The corpora will be used to train a special machine translation system with intention to automatically translate the subtitles between German and Chinese. Since the common length-based algorithm for alignment shows weakness on short spoken sentences, especially on those from different language families, this paper studies to use dynamic programming based on time-shift information in subtitles, and extends it with statistical lexical cues to align the subtitle. In our experiment with around 4,000 Chinese and German sentences, the proposed alignment approach yields 83.8% precision. Furthermore, it is unrelated to languages, and leads to a general method of parallel corpora building between different language families.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Brown, P., Lai, J.C., Mercer, R.: Aligning Sentences in Parallel Corpora. In: Proceedings of the 29th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, Berkeley, California, pp. 169–176 (1991)
Wu, D.K.: Aligning a Parallel English-Chinese Corpus Statistically with Lexical Criteria. In: Proceedings of the 32th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Las Cruces, New Mexico, pp. 80–87 (1994)
Shemtov, H.: Text Aligment in a Tool for Translating Revised Documents. In: Proceedings of the 6th Conference on European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Utrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 449–453 (1993)
Armstrong, S., Way, A., Caffrey, C., Flanagan, M., Kenny, D., O’Hagan, M.: Improving the Quality of Automated DVD Subtitles via Example-based Machine Translation. In: Proceedings of Translating and the Computer, Aslib, London, vol. 28 (2006)
Martin, V.: The Automatic Translation of Film Subtitles. A Machine Translation Success Story? In: Resourceful Language Technology: Festschrift in Honor of Anna, vol. 7. Uppsala University (2008)
Mathieu, M., Emmanuel, G.: Multilingual Aligned Corpora from Movie Subtitles. Rapport interne LISTIC, p. 6 (2005)
Vandeghinste, V., Sang, E.K.: Using a Parallel Transcript/Subtitle Corpus for Sentence Compression. In: LREC, Lisbon, Portugal (2004)
Popowich, F., McFetridge, P., Turcato, D., Toole, J.: Machine translation of Closed Captions. Machine Translation 15, 311–341 (2000)
Och, F., Ney, H.: Improved Statistical Alignment Models. In: Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 440–447 (2000)
Lavecchia, C., Smaïli, K., Langlois, D.: Building Parallel Corpora from Movies. In: 5th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science, Funchal, Portugal (2007)
Tiedemann, J.: Improved Sentence Alignment for Movie Subtitles. In: Proceedings of the 12th Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, Borovets, Bulgaria, pp. 582–588 (2007)
Reinhard, R.: Automatic Identification of Word Translations from Unrelated English and German Corpora. In: Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Computational Linguistics, College Park, Maryland, pp. 519–526 (1999)
Gale, W.A., Church, K.W.: A Program for Aligning Sentences in Bilingual Corpora. Computational Linguistics 19(1), 75–102 (1993)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Xiao, H., Wang, X. (2009). Constructing Parallel Corpus from Movie Subtitles. In: Li, W., Mollá-Aliod, D. (eds) Computer Processing of Oriental Languages. Language Technology for the Knowledge-based Economy. ICCPOL 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5459. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00831-3_32
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00831-3_32
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00830-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00831-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)