TY - GEN
T1 - Translating dialectal arabic to english
AU - Sajjad, Hassan
AU - Darwish, Kareem
AU - Belinkov, Yonatan
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - We present a dialectal Egyptian Arabic to English statistical machine translation system that leverages dialectal to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) adaptation. In contrast to previous work, we first narrow down the gap between Egyptian and MSA by applying an automatic characterlevel transformational model that changes Egyptian to EG', which looks similar to MSA. The transformations include morphological, phonological and spelling changes. The transformation reduces the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words from 5.2% to 2.6% and gives a gain of 1.87 BLEU points. Further, adapting large MSA/English parallel data increases the lexical coverage, reduces OOVs to 0.7% and leads to an absolute BLEU improvement of 2.73 points.
AB - We present a dialectal Egyptian Arabic to English statistical machine translation system that leverages dialectal to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) adaptation. In contrast to previous work, we first narrow down the gap between Egyptian and MSA by applying an automatic characterlevel transformational model that changes Egyptian to EG', which looks similar to MSA. The transformations include morphological, phonological and spelling changes. The transformation reduces the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words from 5.2% to 2.6% and gives a gain of 1.87 BLEU points. Further, adapting large MSA/English parallel data increases the lexical coverage, reduces OOVs to 0.7% and leads to an absolute BLEU improvement of 2.73 points.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84899950721
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9781937284510
T3 - ACL 2013 - 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
SP - 1
EP - 6
BT - Short Papers
T2 - 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2013
Y2 - 4 August 2013 through 9 August 2013
ER -