Improved statistical machine translation using monolingual paraphrases

Preslav Nakov

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arXiv · 2109.15119

Improved statistical machine translation using monolingual paraphrases

Preslav Nakov

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Abstract

We propose a novel monolingual sentence paraphrasing method for augmenting the training data for statistical machine translation systems "for free" -- by creating it from data that is already available rather than having to create more aligned data. Starting with a syntactic tree, we recursively generate new sentence variants where noun compounds are paraphrased using suitable prepositions, and vice-versa -- preposition-containing noun phrases are turned into noun compounds. The evaluation shows an improvement equivalent to 33%-50% of that of doubling the amount of training data.

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Preslav Nakov. 2021-09-25. Improved statistical machine translation using monolingual paraphrases. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.15119

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