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Adding Multilingual Terminological Resources to Parallel Corpora for Statistical Machine Translation Deteriorates System Performance: A Negative Result from Experiments in the Biomedical Domain

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Text, Speech, and Dialogue (TSD 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9302))

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Abstract

Unlike many other domains, biomedicine not only provides a wide range of parallel text corpora to train statistical machine translation (SMT) systems on, but also offers substantial amounts of ‘parallel lexicons’ in the form of multilingual terminologies. We included these lexical repositories, together with common parallel text corpora, into a Moses-based SMT system and three commercial systems and performed experiments on four language pairs, three text genres and several corpus sizes to measure the effects of adding the lexical knowledge sources. Much to our surprise, the SMT systems additionally equipped with ‘parallel lexicons’ underperformed in comparison with those systems trained on parallel text corpora only. This effect could consistently be shown for all systems by Bleu scores, as well as assessments from human judges.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jena University Language & Information Engineering (JULIE) Lab Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Jena, Germany

    Johannes Hellrich & Udo Hahn

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  1. Johannes Hellrich
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  2. Udo Hahn
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Correspondence to Johannes Hellrich .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic

    Pavel Král

  2. University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic

    Václav Matoušek

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Hellrich, J., Hahn, U. (2015). Adding Multilingual Terminological Resources to Parallel Corpora for Statistical Machine Translation Deteriorates System Performance: A Negative Result from Experiments in the Biomedical Domain. In: Král, P., Matoušek, V. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9302. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24033-6_57

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24033-6_57

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-24032-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-24033-6

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