TY - JOUR
T1 - Translation with Scarce Bilingual Resources
AU - Al-Onaizan, Yaser
AU - Germann, Ulrich
AU - Hermjakob, Ulf
AU - Knight, Kevin
AU - Koehn, Philipp
AU - Marcu, Daniel
AU - Yamada, Kenji
PY - 2002
Y1 - 2002
N2 - Machine translation of human languages is a field almost as old as computers themselves. Recent approaches to this challenging problem aim at learning translation knowledge automatically (or semi-automatically) from online text corpora, especially human-translated documents. For some language pairs, substantial translation resources exist, and these corpus-based systems can perform well. But for most language pairs, data is scarce, andcurrent techniques do not work well. To examine the gap betweenhuman and machine translators, we created an experiment in which humanbeings were asked to translate an unknown language into English on thesole basis of a very small bilingual text. Participants performed quite well,and debriefings revealed a number of valuable strategies. We discuss thesestrategies and apply some of them to a statistical translation system.
AB - Machine translation of human languages is a field almost as old as computers themselves. Recent approaches to this challenging problem aim at learning translation knowledge automatically (or semi-automatically) from online text corpora, especially human-translated documents. For some language pairs, substantial translation resources exist, and these corpus-based systems can perform well. But for most language pairs, data is scarce, andcurrent techniques do not work well. To examine the gap betweenhuman and machine translators, we created an experiment in which humanbeings were asked to translate an unknown language into English on thesole basis of a very small bilingual text. Participants performed quite well,and debriefings revealed a number of valuable strategies. We discuss thesestrategies and apply some of them to a statistical translation system.
U2 - 10.1023/A:1025539822079
DO - 10.1023/A:1025539822079
M3 - Article
SN - 1573-0573
VL - 17
SP - 1
EP - 17
JO - Machine Translation
JF - Machine Translation
IS - 1
ER -