Predicting Success in Machine Translation

The performance of machine translation systems varies greatly depending on the source and target languages involved. Determining the contribution of different characteristics of language pairs on system performance is key to knowing what aspects of machine translation to improve and which are irrelevant. This paper investigates the effect of different explanatory variables on the performance of a phrase-based system for 110 European language pairs. We show that three factors are strong predictors of performance in isolation: the amount of reordering, the morphological complexity of the target language and the historical relatedness of the two languages. Together, these factors contribute 75% to the variability of the performance of the system.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: EMNLP
• Authors: Alexandra Birch, Miles Osborne, Philipp Koehn
• Keywords: EMNLP 2008, Language Pairs, Machine Translation, Natural Language Processing, Performance