Improving Translation Selection with Supersenses

AbstractSelecting appropriate translations for source words with multiple meanings still remains a challenge for statistical machine translation (SMT). One reason for this is that most SMT systems are not good at detecting the proper sense for a polysemic word when it appears in different contexts. In this paper, we adopt a supersense tagging method to annotate source words with coarse-grained ontological concepts. In order to enable the system to choose an appropriate translation for a word or phrase according to the annotated supersense of the word or phrase, we propose two translation models with supersense knowledge: a maximum entropy based model and a supersense embedding model. The effectiveness of our proposed models is validated on a large-scale English-to-Spanish translation task. Results indicate that our method can significantly improve translation quality via correctly conveying the meaning of the source language to the target language.