Generating Chinese Couplets using a Statistical MT Approach

摘要

Part of the unique cultural heritage of China is the game of Chinese couplets (duilian). One person challenges the other person with a sentence (first sentence). The other person then replies with a sentence (second sentence) equal in length and word segmentation, in a way that corresponding words in the two sentences match each other by obeying certain constraints on semantic, syntactic, and lexical relatedness. This task is viewed as a difficult problem in AI and has not been explored in the research community.rnIn this paper, we regard this task as a kind of machine translation process. We present a phrase-based SMT approach to generate the second sentence. First, the system takes as input the first sentence, and generates as output an N-best list of proposed second sentences, using a phrase-based SMT decoder. Then, a set of filters is used to remove candidates violating linguistic constraints. Finally, a Ranking SVM is applied to rerank the candidates. A comprehensive evaluation, using both human judgments and BLEU scores, has been conducted, and the results demonstrate that this approach is very successful.