Syntax-based Multi-system Machine Translation

This paper describes a hybrid machine translation system that explores a parser to acquire syntactic chunks of a source sentence, translates the chunks with multiple online machine translation (MT) system application program interfaces (APIs) and creates output by combining translated chunks to obtain the best possible translation. The selection of the best translation hypothesis is performed by calculating the perplexity for each translated chunk. The goal of this approach is to enhance the baseline multi-system hybrid translation (MHyT) system that uses only a language model to select best translation from translations obtained with different APIs and to improve overall English – Latvian machine translation quality over each of the individual MT APIs. The presented syntax-based multi-system translation (SyMHyT) system demonstrates an improvement in terms of BLEU and NIST scores compared to the baseline system. Improvements reach from 1.74 up to 2.54 BLEU points.