How to Account for Idiomatic German Support Verb Constructions in Statistical Machine Translation

Support-verb constructions (i.e., multiword expressions combining a semantically light verb with a predicative noun) are problematic for standard statistical machine translation systems, because SMT systems cannot distinguish between literal and idiomatic uses of the verb. We work on the German to English translation direction, for which the identification of support-verb constructions is challenging due to the relatively free word order of German. We show that we achieve improved translation quality for verb-object supportverb constructions by marking the verbs when occuring in such constructions. Additional evaluations revealed that our systems produce more correct verb translations than a contrastive baseline system without verb markup.