Abu-MaTran at WMT 2016 Translation Task: Deep Learning, Morphological Segmentation and Tuning on Character Sequences

Abstract

This paper presents the systems submitted by the Abu-MaTran project to the Englishto- Finnish language pair at the WMT 2016 news translation task. We applied morphological segmentation and deep learning in order to address (i) the data scarcity problem caused by the lack of in-domain parallel data in the constrained task and (ii) the complex morphology of Finnish. We submitted a neural machine translation system, a statistical machine translation system reranked with a neural language model and the combination of their outputs tuned on character sequences. The combination and the neural system were ranked first and second respectively according to automatic evaluation metrics and tied for the first place in the human evaluation.