We describe efforts towards getting better resources for English-Arabic machine translation of spoken text. In particular, we look at movie subtitles as a unique, rich resource, as subtitles in one language often get translated into other languages. Movie subtitles are not new as a resource and have been explored in previous research; however, here we create a much larger bi-text (the biggest to date), and we further generate better quality alignment for it. Given the subtitles for the same movie in different languages, a key problem is how to align them at the fragment level. Typically, this is done using length-based alignment, but for movie subtitles, there is also time information. Here we exploit this information to develop an original algorithm that outperforms the current best subtitle alignment tool, subalign. The evaluation results show that adding our bi-text to the IWSLT training bi-text yields an improvement of over two BLEU points absolute.
@cite_11: This paper presents the AMARA corpus of on-line educational content: a new parallel corpus of educational video subtitles, multilingually aligned for 20 languages, i.e. 20 monolingual corpora and 190 parallel corpora. This corpus includes both resource-rich languages such as English and Arabic, and resource-poor languages such as Hindi and Thai. In this paper, we describe the gathering, validation, and preprocessing of a large collection of parallel, community-generated subtitles. Furthermore, we describe the methodology used to prepare the data for Machine Translation tasks. Additionally, we provide a document-level, jointly aligned development and test sets for 14 language pairs, designed for tuning and testing Machine Translation systems. We provide baseline results for these tasks, and highlight some of the challenges we face when building machine translation systems for educational content.
@cite_11 used the AMARA content to generate a parallel corpus out of the translations in order to improve an SMT system for the educational domain. They aligned the multi-lingual text of the educational videos and assessed its quality with several measures in comparison with the IWSLT training set, which is very close to the AMARA domain. It is important to note that 75