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International Conference on Text, Speech, and Dialogue

TSD 2014: Text, Speech and Dialogue pp 189–200Cite as

Divergences in the Usage of Discourse Markers in English and Mandarin Chinese

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8655))

Abstract

Statistical machine translation (SMT) has, in recent years, improved the accuracy of automated translations. However, SMT systems often fail to deliver human quality translations especially with complex sentences and distant language pairs. Current SMT systems often focus on translating single sentences with clauses being treated in isolation. leading to a loss of contextual information. Discourse markers (DMs) are vital contextual links between discourse segments and this paper examines the divergences in their usage across English and Mandarin Chinese. We highlight important structural differences in composite sentences extracted from a number of parallel corpora, and show examples of how these cases are dealt with by popular SMT systems. Numerous significant divergences, such as contextual omissions, were observed which can lead to incoherent automatic translations. Our objective is to use these findings to guide a framework proposal to address divergences in DM usage in order to improve SMT output quality.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield, UK

    David Steele & Lucia Specia

Authors
  1. David Steele
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  2. Lucia Specia
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Botanicá 6a, 60200, Brno, Czech Republic

    Petr Sojka

  2. Faculty of Informatics, Department of Information Technologies, Masaryk University, 602 00, Brno, Czech Republic

    Aleš Horák , Ivan Kopeček  & Karel Pala ,  & 

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Steele, D., Specia, L. (2014). Divergences in the Usage of Discourse Markers in English and Mandarin Chinese. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8655. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10816-2_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10816-2_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10815-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10816-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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