Exploiting phrasal lexica and additional morpho-syntactic language resources for statistical machine translation with scarce training data

EAMT 2005 Conference Proceedings 1 The Language Translation Interface Dominique Estival Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Australia Dominique.Estival@dsto.defence.gov.au Abstract. The Language Translation Interface (LTI) is a prototype developed for the Aus- tralian Defence Organisation. The aim is provide a single, simple, interface to a variety of MT tools and utilities for personnel who need to produce translations when they have no easy access to human translators. Now that the LTI has been demonstrated and trialled at several military exercises, we are gathering user requirements to further develop it as the Language Translation Tools Suite. This paper describes the functionalities of the LTI and reports on our experience with users during development, leading to future improvements. 1. Introduction I am very pleased to have been invited to give this opening talk at EAMT 2005, although I re- gret that Harry Somers cannot be with us in Bu- dapest. Australia is a long way from Hungary and he is still enjoying his sabbatical there, but it was when I was talking to Harry a few months ago about some aspects of my work on MT at DSTO that he thought it would be interesting for the EAMT audience. I want to tell you about how we have been able to build a translation system without doing MT and about the way we dealt with the difficulties of getting access to users in our specific environment. Before I tell you what I do at DSTO, I need to say a few words about what it is. DSTO stands for Defence Science and Technology Or- ganisation and is it the R&D organisation for the Australian Defence Organisation. Our custom- ers and end users are primarily the ADF (Aus- tralian Defence Force, the military side of De- fence) and the ADO (Australian Defence Or- ganisation, which also includes the civilian side of Defence), but also the Australian Govern- ment more generally. As an R&D organisation, DSTO may be more “small r and big D” than in earlier times, but it is committed to exploring and utilising technical innovations. In fact, our main role is to give advice on new technologies and to build prototypes to show what advantages these technologies can bring to the end users. I am sure everyone knows where Australia is, but it is always interesting to see on a map what the world looks like from our perspective. Australia is geographically isolated, certainly far away from Europe and North America, and fur- ther from Japan than people realise. We are part of the Pacific-Asia region, with very different linguistic neighbours than our traditional allies, the UK and the US. Australia is a "small" coun- try in spite of its size, with a population of just over 20 million. Our resources are not huge, es- pecially in terms of personnel. The environ- ment, which is very harsh on most of the conti- nent, also means that our technological require- ments – and traditions – are quite different from those of European or …

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