Domain Adaptation for Statistical Machine Translation

Statistical machine translation (SMT) systems perform poorly when it is applied to new target domains. Our goal is to explore domain adaptation approaches and techniques for improving the translation quality of domain-specific SMT systems. However, translating texts from a specific domain (e.g., medicine) is full of challenges. The first challenge is ambiguity. Words or phrases contain different meanings in different contexts. The second one is language style due to the fact that texts from different genres are always presented in different syntax, length and structural organization. The third one is the out-of-vocabulary words (OOVs) problem. In-domain training data are often scarce with low terminology coverage. In this thesis, we explore the state-of-the-art domain adaptation approaches and propose effective solutions to address those problems.