Soft features for statistical machine translation of spoken and signed languages

The goal of statistical machine translation is a transfer of unknown sentences from a source language into a target language. For this purpose, automatic rules are derived from bilingual data collections. Through a probabilistic principle, many alternative sentences are generated which are evaluated by several feature functions. The alternative with the highest probability is selected as the actual translation. In this dissertation, the influence of several, mostly linguistically motivated, feature functions on the translation quality of statistical machine translation is evaluated. With these... Mehr ...