Machine Translation of Spanish Personal and Possessive Pronouns Using Anaphora Probabilities

Abstract

We implement a fully probabilistic model to combine the hypotheses of a Spanish anaphora resolution system with those of a Spanish-English machine translation system. The probabilities over antecedents are converted into probabilities for the features of translated pronouns, and are integrated with phrase-based MT using an additional translation model for pronouns.
The system improves the translation of several Spanish personal and possessive pronouns into English, by solving translation divergencies such as ella→she|it or su→his|her|its|their. On a test set with 2,286 pronouns, a baseline system correctly translates 1,055 of them, while ours improves this by 41. Moreover, with oracle antecedents, possessives are translated with an accuracy of 83%.