Preprocessing for English-to-Arabic Statistical Machine Translation

Most research in Arabic Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) has focused on translating from Arabic into English and other languages. Translation to Arabic has drawn very little attention so far, despite being an important, as well as technically challenging task. This chapter describes the application of two preprocessing techniques to English-to-Arabic SMT: Morphological Segmentation and Syntactic Reordering. It shows how these techniques can be adapted to apply to translation into Arabic, providing significant improvements to a phrase-based system.

• Affiliations: 1: Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge MA, USA; 2: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA, USA