Abstract

Phrase re-ordering is a well-known obstacle to robust machine translation for language pairs with significantly different word orderings. For Arabic-English, two languages that usually differ in the ordering of subject and verb, the subject and its modifiers must be accurately moved to produce a grammatical translation. This operation requires more than base phrase chunking and often defies current phrase-based statistical decoders. We present a conditional random field sequence classifier that detects the full scope of Arabic noun phrase subjects in verb-initial clauses at the Fβ=1 61.3 % level, a 5.0 % absolute improvement

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