A Study of Word-Classing for MT Reordering

Ananthakrishnan Ramanathan, Karthik Visweswariah


Abstract
MT systems typically use parsers to help reorder constituents. However most languages do not have adequate treebank data to learn good parsers, and such training data is extremely time-consuming to annotate. Our earlier work has shown that a reordering model learned from word-alignments using POS tags as features can improve MT performance (Visweswariah et al., 2011). In this paper, we investigate the effect of word-classing on reordering performance using this model. We show that unsupervised word clusters perform somewhat worse but still reasonably well, compared to a part-of-speech (POS) tagger built with a small amount of annotated data; while a richer tag set including case and gender-number-person further improves reordering performance by around 1.2 monolingual BLEU points. While annotating this richer tagset is more complicated than annotating the base tagset, it is much easier than annotating treebank data.
Anthology ID:
L12-1552
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3971–3976
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/921_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ananthakrishnan Ramanathan and Karthik Visweswariah. 2012. A Study of Word-Classing for MT Reordering. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 3971–3976, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Study of Word-Classing for MT Reordering (Ramanathan & Visweswariah, LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/921_Paper.pdf