How hard is it to automatically translate phrasal verbs from English to French

The translation of English phrasal verbs (PVs) into French is a challenge, specially when the verb occurs apart from the particle. Our goal is to quantify how well current SMT paradigms can translate split PVs into French. We compare two inhouse SMT systems, phrase-based and hierarchical, in translating a test set of PVs. Our analysis is based on a carefully designed evaluation protocol for assessing translation quality of a specific linguistic phenomenon. We find out that (a) current SMT technology can only translate 27% of PVs correctly, (b) in spite of their simplistic model, phrase-based systems outperform hierarchical systems and (c) when both systems translate the PV similarly, translation quality improves.

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