Phrase table induction using monolingual data for low-resource statistical machine translation

Abstract

We propose a new method for inducing a phrase-based translation model from a pair of unrelated monolingual corpora. Our method is able to deal with phrases of arbitrary length and to find phrase pairs that are useful for statistical machine translation, without requiring large parallel or comparable corpora. First, our method generates phrase pairs through coupling source and target phrases separately collected from respective monolingual data. Then, for each phrase pair, we compute features using the monolingual data and a small quantity of parallel sentences. Finally, incorrect phrase pairs are pruned, and a phrase table is made using the remaining phrase pairs. In our experiments on French-Japanese and Spanish-Japanese translation tasks under low-resource conditions, we observe that incorporating a phrase table induced by our method to the machine translation system leads to large improvements in translation quality. Furthermore, we show that a phrase table induced by our method can also be useful in a wide range of configurations, including configurations where we have already access to large parallel corpora and configurations where only small monolingual corpora are available.