How to avoid burning ducks: Combining linguistic analysis and corpus statistics for German compound processing

Compound splitting is an important prob-lem in many NLP applications which must be solved in order to address issues of data sparsity. Previous work has shown that lin-guistic approaches for German compound splitting produce a correct splitting more often, but corpus-driven approaches work best for phrase-based statistical machine translation from German to English, a worrisome contradiction. We address this situation by combining linguistic analysis with corpus-driven statistics and obtain-ing better results in terms of both produc-ing splittings according to a gold standard and statistical machine translation perfor-mance.