Syntactic reordering for English-Arabic phrase-based machine translation

Abstract

We investigate syntactic reordering within an English to Arabic translation task. We extend a pre-translation syntactic reordering approach developed on a close language pair (English-Danish) to the distant language pair, English-Arabic. We achieve significant improvements in translation quality over related approaches, measured by manual as well as automatic evaluations. These results prove the viability of this approach for distant languages.