Phrase-Based Backoff Models for Machine Translation of Highly Inflected Languages

We propose a backoff model for phrasebased machine translation that translates unseen word forms in foreign-language text by hierarchical morphological abstractions at the word and the phrase level. The model is evaluated on the Europarl corpus for German-English and FinnishEnglish translation and shows improvements over state-of-the-art phrase-based models.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: EACL
• Authors: Mei Yang, Katrin Kirchhoff
• Keywords: EACL 2006, Hierarchical Morphological Abstractions, Natural Language Processing, State-of-the-art Phrase-based Models, Unseen Word Forms