Name extraction and translation for distillation
Abstract
Name translation is important well beyond the relative frequency of names in a text: a
correctly translated passage, but with the wrong name, may lose most of its value. The
Nightingale team has built a name translation component which operates in tandem with a
conventional phrase-based statistical MT system, identifying names in the source text and
proposing translations to the MT system. Versions have been developed for both Chineseto-
English and Arabic-to-English name translation. The system has four main components, a
name tagger, translation lists, a transliteration engine, and a context-based ranker. This
chapter presents these components in detail and investigates the impact of name translation
on cross-lingual spoken sentence retrieval.
Research Areas
