Domain-Specific Hybrid Machine Translation from English to Portuguese

Abstract

Machine translation (MT) from English to Portuguese has not typically received much attention in existing research. In this paper, we focus on MT from English to Portuguese for the specific domain of information technology (IT), building a small in-domain parallel corpus to address the lack of IT-specific and publicly-available parallel corpora and then adapted an existing hybrid MT system to the new language pair (English to Portuguese). We further improved the initial version of the EN-PT hybrid system by adding various modules to address the most frequently occurring errors in the initial system. In order to assess the improvements achieved by each of these dedicated modules, we compared all versions of our MT system automatically. In addition, we conduct and report on a detailed error analysis of the initial and final versions of our system.

SMT and Hybrid systems of the QTLeap project in the WMT16 IT-task

“…Regarding the English-to-Portuguese TectoMT system (Silva et al, 2015) (Rodrigues et al, 2016a), PT-Treex, in order to get the a-layer the Portuguese system resorted to LX-Suite (Branco and Silva, 2006), a set of pre-existing shallow processing tools for Portuguese that include a sentence segmenter, a tokenizer, a POS tagger, a morphological analyser and a dependency parser, all with state-of-the-art performance. Treex blocks were created to be called and interfaced with these tools.…”