Using monolingual corpora for statistical machine translation: the METIS system

Stella Markantonatou, Ioannis Dologlou, George Tambouratzis

Abstract: In this article the principles of the METIS Machine Translation system are presented. METIS employs an extensive tagged and lemmatised corpus of texts in the target language, coupled with bilingual lexica covering the desired pairs of source-target languages. To generate a high-quality translation, the METIS sys-tem is provided with statistical tools enabling it to extract linguistic knowledge from the annotated corpus of the target language. The advantage of this approach is that, although no grammars need to be provided explicitly, grammatical transla-tions are retrieved from the corpus by using pattern matching techniques.