Towards Handling Verb Phrase Ellipsis in English-Hindi Machine Translation

Niyati Bafna, Dipti Sharma


Abstract
English-Hindi machine translation systems have difficulty interpreting verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) in English, and commit errors in translating sentences with VPE. We present a solution and theoretical backing for the treatment of English VPE, with the specific scope of enabling English-Hindi MT, based on an understanding of the syntactical phenomenon of verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis in Hindi (VVPE). We implement a rule-based system to perform the following sub-tasks: 1) Verb ellipsis identification in the English source sentence, 2) Elided verb phrase head identification 3) Identification of verb segment which needs to be induced at the site of ellipsis 4) Modify input sentence; i.e. resolving VPE and inducing the required verb segment. This system obtains 94.83 percent precision and 83.04 percent recall on subtask (1), tested on 3900 sentences from the BNC corpus. This is competitive with state-of-the-art results. We measure accuracy of subtasks (2) and (3) together, and obtain a 91 percent accuracy on 200 sentences taken from the WSJ corpus. Finally, in order to indicate the relevance of ellipsis handling to MT, we carried out a manual analysis of the English-Hindi MT outputs of 100 sentences after passing it through our system. We set up a basic metric (1-5) for this evaluation, where 5 indicates drastic improvement, and obtained an average of 3.55. As far as we know, this is the first attempt to target ellipsis resolution in the context of improving English-Hindi machine translation.
Anthology ID:
2019.icon-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2019
Address:
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India
Editors:
Dipti Misra Sharma, Pushpak Bhattacharya
Venue:
ICON
SIG:
Publisher:
NLP Association of India
Note:
Pages:
150–159
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2019.icon-1.18
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Niyati Bafna and Dipti Sharma. 2019. Towards Handling Verb Phrase Ellipsis in English-Hindi Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 150–159, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India. NLP Association of India.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Handling Verb Phrase Ellipsis in English-Hindi Machine Translation (Bafna & Sharma, ICON 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2019.icon-1.18.pdf