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Machine Translation on a Parallel Code-Switched Corpus

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Advances in Artificial Intelligence (Canadian AI 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11489))

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Abstract

Code-switching (CS) is the phenomenon that occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages within an utterance or discourse. In this work, we investigate the existence of code-switching in formal text, namely proceedings of multilingual institutions. Our study is carried out on the Arabic-English code-mixing in a parallel corpus extracted from official documents of United Nations. We build a parallel code-switched corpus with two reference translations one in pure Arabic and the other in pure English. We also carry out a human evaluation of this resource in the aim to use it to evaluate the translation of code-switched documents. To the best of our knowledge, this kind of corpora does not exist. The one we propose is unique. This paper examines several methods to translate code-switched corpus: conventional statistical machine translation, the end-to-end neural machine translation and multitask-learning.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/ssut/py-googletrans.

  2. 2.

    https://smart.loria.fr/Fichiers/MTCS.rar.

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Correspondence to M. A. Menacer .

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Menacer, M.A., Langlois, D., Jouvet, D., Fohr, D., Mella, O., Smaïli, K. (2019). Machine Translation on a Parallel Code-Switched Corpus. In: Meurs, MJ., Rudzicz, F. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence. Canadian AI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11489. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18305-9_40

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18305-9_40

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-18304-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-18305-9

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