Methods for integrating rule-based and statistical systems for Arabic to English machine translation

This article presents several techniques for integrating information from a rule-based machine translation (RBMT) system into a statistical machine translation (SMT) framework. These techniques are grouped into three parts that correspond to the type of information integrated: the morphological, lexical, and system levels. The first part presents techniques that use information from a rule-based morphological tagger to do morpheme splitting of the Arabic source text. We also compare with the results of using a statistical morphological tagger. In the second part, we present two ways of using Arabic diacritics to improve SMT results, both based on binary decision trees. The third part presents a system combination method that combines the outputs of the RBMT and the SMT systems, leveraging the strength of each. This article shows how language specific information obtained through a deterministic rule-based process can be used to improve SMT, which is mostly language-independent. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.(outside the USA).