Role of Morphology Injection in Statistical Machine Translation

Abstract

Phrase-based Statistical models are more commonly used as they perform optimally in terms of both, translation quality and complexity of the system. Hindi and in general all Indian languages are morphologically richer than English. Hence, even though Phrase-based systems perform very well for the less divergent language pairs, for English to Indian language translation, we need more linguistic information (such as morphology, parse tree, parts of speech tags, etc.) on the source side. Factored models seem to be useful in this case, as Factored models consider word as a vector of factors. These factors can contain any information about the surface word and use it while translating. Hence, the objective of this work is to handle morphological inflections in Hindi and Marathi using Factored translation models while translating from English. SMT approaches face the problem of data sparsity while translating into a morphologically rich language. It is very unlikely for a parallel corpus to contain all morphological forms of words. We propose a solution to generate these unseen morphological forms and inject them into original training corpora. In this paper, we study factored models and the problem of sparseness in context of translation to morphologically rich languages. We propose a simple and effective solution which is based on enriching the input with various morphological forms of words. We observe that morphology injection improves the quality of translation in terms of both adequacy and fluency. We verify this with the experiments on two morphologically rich languages: Hindi and Marathi, while translating from English.