A maximum entropy word aligner for Arabic- English machine translation

Abstract

This paper presents a maximum entropy word alignment algorithm for Arabic- English based on supervised training data. We demonstrate that it is feasible to create training material for problems in machine translation and that a mixture of supervised and unsupervised methods yields superior performance. The probabilistic model used in the alignment directly models the link decisions. Significant improvement over traditional word alignment techniques is shown as well as improvement on several machine translation tests. Performance of the algorithm is contrasted with human annotation performance. © 2005 Association for Computational Linguistics.