On the use of comparable corpora to improve SMT performance

Abstract

We present a simple and effective method for extracting parallel sentences from comparable corpora. We employ a statistical machine translation (SMT) system built from small amounts of parallel texts to translate the source side of the non-parallel corpus. The target side texts are used, along with other corpora, in the language model of this SMT system. We then use information retrieval techniques and simple filters to create French/English parallel data from a comparable news corpora. We evaluate the quality of the extracted data by showing that it significantly improves the performance of an SMT systems.