Evaluation-guided pre-editing of source text: improving MT-tractability of light verb constructions

This paper reports an experiment on eval-uating and improving MT quality of light-verb construction (LVCs) – com-binations of a ‘semantically depleted’ verb and its complement. Our method uses construction-level human evaluation for systematic discovery of mistranslated contexts and creating automatic pre-edit-ing rules, which make the constructions more tractable for Rule-Based Machine Translation (RBMT) systems. For rewrit-ten phrases we achieve about 40 % reduc-tion in the number of incomprehensible translations into English from both French and Russian. The proposed meth-od can be used for enhancing automatic pre-editing functionality of state-of-the-art MT systems. It will allow MT users to create their own rewriting rules for fre-quently mistranslated constructions and contexts, going beyond existing systems’ capabilities offered by user dictionaries and do-not translate lists. 1 Introduction: Automati