2008 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Four Techniques for Online Handling of Out-of-Vocabulary Words in Arabic-English Statistical Machine Translation

Habash, Nizar Y.

We present four techniques for online handling of Out-of-Vocabulary words in Phrasebased Statistical Machine Translation. The techniques use spelling expansion, morphological expansion, dictionary term expansion and proper name transliteration to reuse or extend a phrase table. We compare the performance of these techniques and combine them. Our results show a consistent improvement over a state-of-the-art baseline in terms of BLEU and a manual error analysis.