An Overview of the Challenges and Progress in PeEn-SMT: First Large Scale Persian-English SMT System

Abstract

This paper documents recent work carried out for PeEn-SMT, our Statistical Machine Translation system for translation between the English-Persian language pair. We give details of our previous SMT system, and present our current development of significantly larger corpora. We explain how recent tests using much larger corpora helped to evaluate problems in parallel corpus alignment, corpus content, and how matching the domains of PeEn-SMT’s components affect translation outcome. We then focus on combining corpora and approaches to improve test data, showing details of experimental setup, together with a number of experiment results and comparisons between them. We show how one combination of corpora gave us a metric score outperforming Google Translate for the English-to-Persian translation. Finally, we outline areas of our intended future work, and how we plan to improve the performance of our system to achieve higher metric scores, and ultimately to provide accurate, reliable language translation.