Evaluating the English-Turkish parallel treebank for machine translation

Abstract

This study extends our initial efforts in building an English-Turkish parallel treebank corpus for statistical machine translation tasks. We manually generated parallel trees for about 17K sentences selected from the Penn Treebank corpus. English sentences vary in length: 15 to 50 tokens including punctuation. We constrained the translation of trees by (i) reordering of leaf nodes based on suffixation rules in Turkish, and (ii) gloss replacement. We aim to mimic human annotator’s behavior in real translation task. In order to fill the morphological and syntactic gap between languages, we do morphological annotation and disambiguation. We also apply our heuristics by creating Nokia English-Turkish Treebank (NTB) to address technical document translation tasks. NTB also includes 8.3K sentences in varying lengths. We validate the corpus both extrinsically and intrinsically, and report our evaluation results regarding perplexity analysis and translation task results. Results prove that our heuristics yield promising results in terms of perplexity and are suitable for translation tasks in terms of BLEU scores.