This paper proposes a novel method for phrase-based statistical machine translation by using pivot language. To conduct trans- lation between languages L f and L e with a small bilingual corpus, we bring in a third language L p, which is named the pivot lan- guage. For L f -L p and L p -L e, there exist large bilingual corpora. Using only L f -L p and L p -L e bilingual corpora, we can build a translation model for L f -L e. The advantage of this method lies in that we can perform translation between L f and L e even if there is no bilingual corpus available for this language pair. Using BLEU as a metric, our pivot language method achieves an ab- solute improvement of 0.06 (22.13% rela- tive) as compared with the model directly trained with 5,000 L f -L e sentence pairs for French-Spanish ...

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