Hybrid Statistical Machine Translation for English-Myanmar: UTYCC Submission to WAT-2021.

In this paper we describe our submissions to WAT-2021 (Nakazawa et al., 2021) for English-to-Myanmar language (Burmese) task. Our team, ID: “YCC-MT1”, focused on bringing transliteration knowledge to the decoder without changing the model. We manually extracted the transliteration word/phrase pairs from the ALT corpus and applying XML markup feature of Moses decoder (i.e. -xml-input exclusive, -xml-input inclusive). We demonstrate that hybrid translation technique can significantly improve (around 6 BLEU scores) the baseline of three well-known “Phrase-based SMT”, “Operation Sequence Model” and “Hierarchical Phrase-based SMT”. Moreover, this simple hybrid method achieved the second highest results among the submitted MT systems for English-to-Myanmar WAT2021 translation share task according to BLEU (Papineni et al., 2002) and AMFM scores (Banchs et al., 2015).