Parsing Myanmar (Burmese) by Using Japanese as a Pivot

As Myanmar (Burmese) and Japanese share similar syntactic structures, we explore an approach for parsing Myanmar by using Japanese as a pivot. Specifically, we first apply a statistical machines translation (SMT) system to translate Myanmar sentences into Japanese, and then we parse the Japanese translations. Finally, the Japanese syntactic structures are mapped to the original Myanmar sentences. As a state-of-the-art SMT system performs well on translating syntactically-similar languages and the parsing techniques for Japanese have been well-studied, we have satisfactory results in experiments.