Rule-Based Pronominal Anaphora Treatment for Machine Translation

In this paper we describe the rule-based MT system Its-2 developed at the University of Geneva and submitted for the shared task on pronoun translation organized within the Second DiscoMT Workshop. For improving pronoun translation, an Anaphora Resolution (AR) step based on Chomsky’s Binding Theory and Hobbs’ algorithm has been implemented. Since this strategy is currently restricted to 3rd person personal pronouns (i.e. they, it translated as elle, elles, il, ils only), absolute performance is affected. However, qualitative differences between the submitted system and a baseline without the AR procedure can be observed.