Leveraging Compounds to Improve Noun Phrase Translation from Chinese and German

Xiao Pu, Laura Mascarell, Andrei Popescu-Belis, Mark Fishel, Ngoc-Quang Luong, Martin Volk

Abstract: This paper presents a method to improve the translation of polysemous nouns, when a previous occurrence of the noun as the head of a compound noun phrase is available in a text. The occurrences are identified through pattern matching rules, which detect XY compounds followed closely by a potentially coreferent occurrence of Y , such as “Nordwand ... Wand”. Two strategies are proposed to improve the translation of the second occurrence of Y : re-using the cached translation of Y from the XY compound, or post-editing the translation of Y using the head of the translation of XY . Experiments are performed on Chinese-toEnglish and German-to-French statistical machine translation, over the WIT3 and Text+Berg corpora respectively, with 261 XY/Y pairs each. The results suggest that while the overall BLEU scores increase only slightly, the translations of the targeted polysemous nouns are significantly improved.