Chinese-Portuguese machine translation: A study on building parallel corpora from comparable texts

Siyou Liu, Longyue Wang, Chao Hong Liu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Although there are increasing and significant ties between China and Portuguese-speaking countries, there is not much parallel corpora in the Chinese-Portuguese language pair. Both languages are very populous, with 1.2 billion native Chinese speakers and 279 million native Portuguese speakers, the language pair, however, could be considered as low-resource in terms of available parallel corpora. In this paper, we describe our methods to curate Chinese-Portuguese parallel corpora and evaluate their quality. We extracted bilingual data from Macao government websites and proposed a hierarchical strategy to build a large parallel corpus. Experiments are conducted on existing and our corpora using both Phrased-Based Machine Translation (PBMT) and the state-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. The results of this work can be used as a benchmark for future Chinese-Portuguese MT systems. The approach we used in this paper also shows a good example on how to boost performance of MT systems for low-resource language pairs.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLREC 2018 - 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
EditorsHitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Stelios Piperidis, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Koiti Hasida, Helene Mazo, Khalid Choukri, Sara Goggi, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Nicoletta Calzolari, Jan Odijk, Takenobu Tokunaga
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages1485-1492
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9791095546009
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Event11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2018 - Miyazaki, Japan
Duration: 7 May 201812 May 2018

Publication series

NameLREC 2018 - 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

Conference

Conference11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2018
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityMiyazaki
Period7/05/1812/05/18

Keywords

  • Chinese-Portuguese
  • Low-Resource
  • Neural Machine Translation
  • Parallel Corpus
  • Statistical Machine Translation

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