Conceptual transfer: Using local classifiers for transfer selection

A key challenge for Machine Translation is transfer selection, i.e. to find the right translation for a given word from a set of alternatives (1:n). This problem becomes the more important the larger the dictionary is, as the number of alternatives increases. The contribution presents a novel approach for transfer selection, called conceptual transfer, where selection is done using classifiers based on the conceptual context of a translation candidate on the source language side. Such classifiers are built automatically by parallel corpus analysis: Creating subcorpora for each translation of a 1:n package, and identifying correlating concepts in these subcorpora as features of the classifier. The resulting resource can easily be linked to transfer components of MT systems as it does not depend on internal analysis structures. Tests show that conceptual transfer outperforms the selection techniques currently used in operational MT systems.