A co-chunk based method for spoken-language translation.docVIP

A Co-Chunk based method for Spoken-language Translation CHENG Wei, ZHAO Jun, LIU Feifan and XU Bo National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China Wcheng@bcu.edu.cn , jzhao@nlpr.ia.ac.cn , ffliu@nlpr.ia.ac.cn , xubo@hitic.ia.ac.cn ABSTRACT Chunking is a useful step for natural language processing. The paper puts forward a definition of co-chunks for Chinese-English spoken-language translation, based on both the characteristics of spoken-language and the differences between Chinese and English. An algorithm is proposed to identify the co-chunks automatically, which combines the rules into a statistical method and makes a co-chunk has both syntactical structure and perfect meaning. Using the co-chunk alignment corpus, we present the framework of our translation system. In the framework, the word-based translation mode is employed to smooth the co-chunk-based translation model. A series of experiments show that the proposed definition and the co-chunking method can lead to great improvement to the quality of the Chinese-English spoken-language translation. Keywords chunking; spoken-language translation; statistical machine translation. Introduction It is well known that speech-to-speech translation faces more problems in comparison with pure text translation, such as: More irregular spoken utterances: There are much more pauses, repetitions, omitting etc. in spoken language. More flexible speech styles: slow or rapid speeches with different stresses, accent, appears. No punctuation to segment the utterances. Confronted with these problems, more robust technologies are needed to be developed to achieve an acceptable performance in the spoken-language translation system. In recent years, some data-driven methods are taken as the effectual ways for machine translation, such as the example-based machine translation (EBMT, proposed by ATR) and the statistical machine translation (SMT).