Toponym Disambiguation in an English-Lithuanian SMT System with Spatial Knowledge

This paper presents an innovative research resulting in the English-Lithuanian statistical factored phrase-based machine translation system with a spatial ontology. The system is based on the Moses toolkit and is enriched with semantic knowledge inferred from the spatial ontology. The ontology was developed on the basis of the GeoNames database (more than 15 000 toponyms), implemented in the web ontology language (OWL), and integrated into the machine translation process. Spatial knowledge was added as an additional factor in the statistical translation model and used for toponym disambiguation during machine translation. The implemented machine translation approach was evaluated against the baseline system without spatial knowledge. A multifaceted evaluation strategy including automatic metrics, human evaluation and linguistic analysis, was implemented to perform evaluation experiments. The results of the evaluation have shown a slight improvement in the output quality of machine translation with spatial knowledge.

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