ISCA Archive IWSLT 2008
ISCA Archive IWSLT 2008

Improving statistical machine translation by paraphrasing the training data

Francis Bond, Eric Nichols, Darren Scott Appling, Michael Paul

Large amounts of training data are essential for training statistical machine translations systems. In this paper we show how training data can be expanded by paraphrasing one side. The new data is made by parsing then generating using a precise HPSG based grammar, which gives sentences with the same meaning, but minor variations in lexical choice and word order. In experiments with Japanese and English, we showed consistent gains on the Tanaka Corpus with less consistent improvement on the IWSLT 2005 evaluation data.