Combining Source and Target Language Information for Name Tagging of Machine Translation Output

A Named Entity Recognizer (NER) generally has worse performance on machine translated text, because of the poor syntax of the MT output and other errors in the translation. As some tagging distinctions are clearer in the source, and some in the target, we tried to integrate the tag information from both source and target to improve target language tagging performance, especially recall. In our experiments with Chinese-to-English MT output, we first used a simple merge of the outputs from an ET (Entity Translation) system and an English NER system, getting an absolute gain of 7.15% in F-measure, from 73.53% to 80.68%. We then trained an MEMM module to integrate them more discriminatively, and got a further average gain of 2.74% in F-measure, from 80.68% to 83.42%.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Shasha Liao
• Keywords: ACL 2008, Computational Linguistics, Language Tagging Performance, Machine Translated Text, MT Output