Improving Arabic-Chinese Statistical Machine Translation using English as Pivot Language

By Nizar Habash, Jun Hu. 2009

59 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a comparison of two approaches for Arabic-Chinese machine translation using English as a pivot language: sentence pivoting and phrase-table pivoting. Our results show that using English as a pivot in either approach outperforms direct translation from Arabic to Chinese. Our best result is the phrase-pivot system which scores higher than direct translation by 1.1 BLEU points. An error analysis of our best system shows that we successfully handle many complex Arabic-Chinese syntactic variations.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Molecular Biology, Machine Translation

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Citations in the corpus

Complete Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2020, neutral): “Which is why models tasked with direct translation be-tween non-English pairs either resort to bridging (pivoting) through a pivot language (Habash and Hu, 2009), or make use of synthetic parallel data (via back-translation) (Firat et al., 2016b; Chen et al., 2017) or study the problem under…”
Zero-Resource Translation with Multi-Lingual Neural Machine Translation (2016, methodology): “Zero-resource translation has been addressed by pivot-based translation in traditional machine translation research (Wu and Wang, 2007; Utiyama and Isahara, 2007; Habash and Hu, 2009), but we explore a way to use the multi-way, multilingual neural model to translate directly from a source to target ”
Book Reviews: Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing by Nizar Y. Habash (2010, background): “The majority of Arabic MT research is on Arabic-English; however, there are some published efforts in English-Arabic[99, 188, 13, 106] Arabic-French[190] and even Arabic-Chinese [191], Danish-Arabic [192] and Hebrew-Arabic [193].”
A Parallel Corpus for Evaluating Machine Translation between Arabic and European Languages (2017, methodology): “We leave exploring more sophisticated pivoting techniques (Utiyama and Isahara, 2007; Habash and Hu, 2009; El Kholy et al., 2013)”
Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics (2015, background): “Habash and Hu (2009) discuss the specific case of using English as a pivot language for Chinese and Arabic.”