A Statistical Method for Translating Chinese

into Under-resourced Minority Languages

Lei Chen, Miao Li, Jian Zhang, Zede Zhu, and Zhenxin Yang

Institute of Intelligent Machines, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Hefei 230031, China
alan.cl@163.com, {mli,jzhang}@iim.ac.cn,
{zhuzede,xinzyang}@mail.ustc.edu.cn

Abstract. In order to improve the performance of statistical machine

translation between Chinese and minority languages, most of which are
under-resourced languages with different word order and rich morphol-
ogy, the paper proposes a method which incorporates syntactic informa-
tion of the source-side and morphological information of the target-side
to simultaneously reduce the differences of word order and morphology.
First, according to the word alignment and the phrase structure trees of
source language, reordering rules are extracted automatically to adjust
the word order at source side. And then based on Hidden Markov Model,
a morphological segmentation method is adopted to obtain morphologi-
cal information of the target language. In the experiments, we take the
Chinese-Mongolian translation as an example. A morpheme-level sta-
tistical machine translation system, constructed based on the reordered
source side and the segmented target side, achieves 2.1 BLEU points
increment over the standard phrase-based system.

Keywords: Under-resourced languages, Mongolian, Reordering, Mor-

phological segmentation, Machine translation.

1 Introduction

Compared with Chinese, most Chinese minority languages, such as Mongolian,

Uyghur, etc., are under-resourced languages with different word order and rich
morphology[2]. First, different from the subject-verb-object structures of Chi-
nese, these minority languages are always in the subject-object-verb structures.
Second, Chinese is an isolated language without any morphological changes. As
highly agglutinative languages with a rich set of affixes, these minority languages
may have a large quantities of word surface forms due to the inflectional and
derivational productions. The incoordinate morphological information between
Chinese and these under-resourced languages may cause serious data sparse-
ness problem. Consequently, statistical machine translation (SMT) is difficult to
achieve high performance in dealing with the translation between Chinese and
these minority languages. According to the evaluation summary report of the
9th China Workshop on Machine Translation[17], the errors of the translation

X. Shi and Y. Chen (Eds.): CWMT 2014, CCIS 493, pp. 49–60, 2014.

c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
50 L. Chen et al.

words choice and word order are two major errors of SMT systems. Therefore,
how to reduce the differences of word order and morphology between Chinese
and these minority languages is an important issue in SMT.
Taking Mongolian, one of Chinese minority languages, as an example, the pa-
per proposes a method which incorporates syntactic information of the source-
side and morphological information of the target-side. First, according to the
word alignment and the phrase structure trees of source language, reordering
rules are extracted automatically to adjust the word order at source side. And
then at target side, a morphological segmentation method is adopted to obtain
the morphological information of target language. The sentences consisting of
Mongolian words are used to construct Hidden Markov Model (HMM) asso-
ciated with the affixes. Based on this model, the affixes corresponding to the
Mongolian words to be segmented are found to obtain the stems. This method
transforms the segmentation problem into sequence labelling problem which is
able to reduce the segmentation ambiguity. Taking advantage of the reordered
source language and the segmented target language, a morpheme-level SMT sys-
tem can be constructed. The experimental results show that the morpheme-level
Chinese-Mongolian SMT system achieves 2.1 BLEU points increment over the
standard phrase-based machine translation system.

2 Related Works

The reordering model is significant to improve the performance of translations.

One kind of reordering models integrates the reordering knowledge into the log-
linear statistical translation model as a feature, such as (Hou, et al., 2009)[5],
(Zhang and Zong, 2009)[25], (Feng, et al., 2013)[4], etc. and more recent works
(Li, et al., 2014)[12], (Cao, et al., 2014)[1], (Li, et al., 2014)[13], etc. When lan-
guages pairs have the great differences of word order or morphology, this kind
of reordering models may have difficulty in finding the required features. Mean-
while, the models will become more complicated and cost much more time after
integrating the features in training and decoding. Another kind of reordering
models uses a preprocessing to adjust the word orders of source language to be
consistent with target language as much as possible, such as (Lee, et al. 2010)[11],
(Visweswariah, et al., 2010)[22], (Khalilov and Sima’an, 2011)[7], etc. The effect
of this kind of reordering models depends on the reordering rules, which can
be written artificially or extracted automatically from parallel corpus. (Liang,
et al., 2011)[15] and (Wangsiriguleng, et al., 2011)[23] proposed some manually
written reordering rules for the Chinese-Mongolian SMT. (Chen, et al., 2013)[2]
extracted rules automatically from a small-scale parallel corpus and made a com-
parison with the manually written rules in Chinese-Mongolian SMT. Of course,
the two kinds of reordering models mentioned above are not exclusive for each
other. Some models not only can be used as the preprocessing for source side
reordering but also can be integrated into the decoder as a feature function, eg.
(Yang, et al., 2012)[24]. Since it is difficult to find the required features in the
first kind of reordering models, and the manually written rules are inadequate