Case markers and morphology

Abstract

We report in this paper our work on accurately generating case markers and suffixes in English-to-Hindi SMT. Hindi is a relatively free word-order language, and makes use of a comparatively richer set of case markers and morphological suffixes for correct meaning representation. From our experience of large-scale English-Hindi MT, we are convinced that fluency and fidelity in the Hindi output get an order of magnitude facelift if accurate case markers and suffixes are produced. Now, the moot question is: what entity on the English side encodes the information contained in case markers and suffixes on the Hindi side? Our studies of correspondences in the two languages show that case markers and suffixes in Hindi are predominantly determined by the combination of suffixes and semantic relations on the English side. We, therefore, augment the aligned corpus of the two languages, with the correspondence of English suffixes and semantic relations with Hindi suffixes and case markers. Our results on 400 test sentences, translated using an SMT system trained on around 13000 parallel sentences, show that suffix + semantic relation → case marker/suffix is a very useful translation factor, in the sense of making a significant difference to output quality as indicated by subjective evaluation as well as BLEU scores.