Abstract

This paper studies the impact that difficult-totranslate source-language phrases might have on the machine translation process. We formulate the notion of difficulty as a measurable quantity; we show that a classifier can be trained to predict whether a phrase might be difficult to translate; and we develop a framework that makes use of the classifier and external resources (such as human translators) to improve the overall translation quality. Through experimental work, we verify that by isolating difficult-to-translate phrases and processing them as special cases, their negative impact on the translation of the rest of the sentences can be reduced. 1

Citations