Statistical Machine Translation of Australian Aboriginal Languages: Morphological Analysis with Languages of Differing Morphological Richness

Morphological analysis is often used during preprocessing in Statistical Machine Translation. Existing work suggests that the benefit would be greater for more highly inflected languages, although to our knowledge this has not been systematically tested on languages with comparable morphology. In this paper, two comparable languages with different amounts of inflection are tested, to see if the benefits of morphology used during the translation process, depends on the morphological richness of the language. For this work we use indigenous Australian languages: most Australian Aboriginal languages are highly inflected, where words can take a considerable number of postfixes when compared to Indo-European languages, and for languages in the same (Pama Nyungan) family, the morphological system works similarly. We show in this preliminary work that morphological analysis clearly benefits the richer of the two languages investigated, but is more equivocal in the case of the other.