A finite-state approach to machine translation

  • Authors:
  • Srinivas Bangalore;Giuseppe Riccardi

  • Affiliations:
  • AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park, NJ;AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park, NJ

  • Venue:
  • NAACL '01 Proceedings of the second meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Language technologies
  • Year:
  • 2001

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The problem of machine translation can be viewed as consisting of two subproblems (a) Lexical Selection and (b) Lexical Reordering. We propose stochastic finite-state models for these two subproblems in this paper. Stochastic finite-state models are efficiently learnable from data, effective for decoding and are associated with a calculus for composing models which allows for tight integration of constraints from various levels of language processing. We present a method for learning stochastic finite-state models for lexical choice and lexical reordering that are trained automatically from pairs of source and target utterances. We use this method to develop models for English-Japanese translation and present the performance of these models for translation on speech and text. We also evaluate the efficacy of such a translation model in the context of a call routing task of unconstrained speech utterances.