Improving Statistical Machine Translation Quality Using Differential Evolution

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Dugonik, Jani^{; *} | Bošković, Borko | Brest, Janez | Sepesy Maučec, Mirjam

Affiliations: Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor, Koroška c. 46, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia. E-mails: jani.dugonik@um.si, borko.boskovic@um.si, janez.brest@um.si, mirjam.sepesy@um.si

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author.

Abstract: Machine Translation has become an important tool in overcoming the language barrier. The quality of translations depends on the languages and used methods. The research presented in this paper is based on well-known standard methods for Statistical Machine Translation that are advanced by a newly proposed approach for optimizing the weights of translation system components. Better weights of system components improve the translation quality. In most cases, machine translation systems translate to/from English and, in our research, English is paired with a Slavic language, Slovenian. In our experiment, we built two Statistical Machine Translation systems for the Slovenian-English language pair of the Acquis Communautaire corpus. Both systems were optimized using self-adaptive Differential Evolution and compared to the other related optimization methods. The results show improvement in the translation quality, and are comparable to the other related methods.

Keywords: statistical machine translation, differential evolution, optimization

Journal: Informatica, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 629-645, 2019