A tree-based approach for English-to-Turkish translation

Abstract

In this paper, we present our English-to-Turkish translation methodology, which adopts a tree-based approach. Our approach relies on tree analysis and the application of structural modification rules to get the target side (Turkish) trees from source side (English) ones. We also use morphological analysis to get candidate root words and apply tree-based rules to obtain the agglutinated target words. Compared to earlier work on English-to-Turkish translation using phrase-based models, we have been able to obtain higher BLEU scores in our current study. Our syntactic subtree permutation strategy, combined with a word replacement algorithm, provides a 67% relative improvement from a baseline 12.8 to 21.4 BLEU, all averaged over 10-fold cross-validation. As future work, improvements in choosing the correct senses and structural rules are needed.