We explore the use of the orthographic syllable, a variable-length consonant-vowel sequence, as a basic unit of translation between related languages which use abugida or alphabetic scripts. We show that orthographic syllable level translation significantly outperforms models trained over other basic units (word, morpheme and character) when training over small parallel corpora.
REF proposed orthographic syllables, a linguistically-motivated variable-length unit, which approximates a syllable.
Orthographic Syllable as basic unit for SMT between Related Languages
ArXiv
ArXiv
Computer Science