The University of Illinois submission to the WMT 2015 Shared Translation Task

By Lane Schwartz, Bill Bryce, Chase Geigle, Sean Massung, Yisi Liu, Haoruo Peng, Vignesh Raja, Subhro Roy, Shyam Upadhyay. 2015

In this year’s WMT translation task, Finnish-English was introduced as a language pair of competition for the first time. We present experiments examining several variations on a morphologically-aware statistical phrase-based machine translation system for translating Finnish into English. Our system variations attempt to mitigate the issue of rich agglutinative morphology when translating from Finnish into English. Our WMT submission for Finnish-English preprocesses Finnish data with omorfi (Pirinen, 2015), a Finnish morphological analyzer. We also present results for two other language pairs with morphologically interesting source languages, namely German-English and Czech-English.