Better Together: Modern Methods Plus Traditional Thinking in NP Alignment

Ádám Kovács, Judit Ács, András Kornai, Gábor Recski

Abstract: We study a typical intermediary task to Machine Translation, the alignment of NPs in the bitext. After arguing that the task remains relevant even in an end-to-end paradigm, we present simple, dictionary- and word vector-based baselines and a BERT-based system. Our results make clear that even state of the art systems relying on the best end-to-end methods can be improved by bringing in old-fashioned methods such as stopword removal, lemmatization, and dictionaries