Cross-Linguistic Projection for French-Vietnamese Named Entity Translation

摘要

High-quality translation is time-consuming and an expensive process. Named Entity (NE) Translation, including proper names, remains a very important task for multilingual natural language processing. Most of the gold standard corpora are available for English but not for under-resourced languages such as Vietnamese. In Asian languages, this task is remained problematic. This paper focuses on a named entity translation approach by cross-linguistic projection for French-Vietnamese, a poor-resourced pair of languages. We incrementally apply a cross-projection method using a small parallel annotated corpora, such as the surface string matching measures according to probabilistic string edit distance similarity and an additional score of syllable consistence feature between the source term and the target term by a syllabification process. Evaluations on French-Vietnamese pair show a good accuracy with BLEU gain more than 4 points when translating bilingual named entities pairs.