Building and using multimodal comparable corpora for machine translation†. (15th June 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: AFLI, HAITHEM; BARRAULT, LOÏC; SCHWENK, HOLGER
• Editors: Rapp, Reinhard; Sharoff, Serge; Zweigenbaum, Pierre
• Is Part Of: Natural language engineering. Volume 22:Part 4(2016)
• Page Start: 603
• Page End: 625
• Publication Date: 2016-06-15
• Subjects: Natural language processing (Computer science) -- Periodicals; Software engineering -- Periodicals; 006.35
• DOI: 10.1017/S1351324916000152
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1351-3249

Abstract

Abstract: In recent decades, statistical approaches have significantly advanced the development of machine translation systems. However, the applicability of these methods directly depends on the availability of very large quantities of parallel data. Recent works have demonstrated that a comparable corpus can compensate for the shortage of parallel corpora. In this paper, we propose an alternative to comparable corpora containing text documents as resources for extracting parallel data: a multimodal comparable corpus with audio documents in source language and text document in target language, built from Euronews and TED web sites. The audio is transcribed by an automatic speech recognition system, and translated with a baseline statistical machine translation system. We then use information retrieval in a large text corpus in the target language in order to extract parallel sentences/phrases. We evaluate the quality of the extracted data on an English to French translation task and show significant improvements over a state-of-the-art baseline.