Consistent Translation of Repeated Nouns using Syntactic and Semantic Cues
We propose a method to decide whether two occurrences of the same noun in a source text should be translated consistently, i.e. using the same noun in the target text as well. We train and test classifiers that predict consistent translations based on lexical, syntactic, and semantic features. We first evaluate the accuracy of our classifiers intrinsically, in terms of the accuracy of consistency predictions, over a subset of the UN Corpus. Then, we also evaluate them in combination with phrase-based statistical MT systems for Chinese-to-English and German-to-English. We compare the automatic post-editing of noun translations with the re-ranking of the translation hypotheses based on the classifiers{'} output, and also use these methods in combination. This improves over the baseline and closes up to 50{\%} of the gap in BLEU scores between the baseline and an oracle classifier.
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