Machine Translation Evaluation for Arabic using Morphologically-enriched Embeddings

Francisco Guzmán, Houda Bouamor, Ramy Baly, Nizar Habash


Abstract
Evaluation of machine translation (MT) into morphologically rich languages (MRL) has not been well studied despite posing many challenges. In this paper, we explore the use of embeddings obtained from different levels of lexical and morpho-syntactic linguistic analysis and show that they improve MT evaluation into an MRL. Specifically we report on Arabic, a language with complex and rich morphology. Our results show that using a neural-network model with different input representations produces results that clearly outperform the state-of-the-art for MT evaluation into Arabic, by almost over 75% increase in correlation with human judgments on pairwise MT evaluation quality task. More importantly, we demonstrate the usefulness of morpho-syntactic representations to model sentence similarity for MT evaluation and address complex linguistic phenomena of Arabic.
Anthology ID:
C16-1132
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
1398–1408
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1132
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Francisco Guzmán, Houda Bouamor, Ramy Baly, and Nizar Habash. 2016. Machine Translation Evaluation for Arabic using Morphologically-enriched Embeddings. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 1398–1408, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Machine Translation Evaluation for Arabic using Morphologically-enriched Embeddings (Guzmán et al., COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1132.pdf