Translation of News Headlines

Machine-Translation of news headlines is difficult since the sentences are fragmentary and abbreviations and acronyms of proper names are frequently used. Another difficulty is that, since the headline comes at the top of a news article, the context information useful to disambiguate the sense of words and to determine their translation(target word) is not available. This paper proposes a new approach to translating English news headline. In this approach, the abbreviations and acronyms in the headlines are complemented with their coreference in the lead of the article. Moreover, the target word selection is performed by referring to the translation of similar news articles retrieved from a parallel corpus. In the experiment, 100 English headlines are translated into Japanese using a corpus containing 30,000 English-Japanese article pairs, resulting in a 17 % improvement in the target words and a 21 % improvement in the style of translation.