Example-Based Machine Translation in the Pangloss system

The Pangloss Example-Based Machine Translation engine (PanEBMT) is a translation system requiring essentially no knowledge of the structure of a language, merely a large parallel corpus of example sentences and a bilingual dictionary. Input texts are segmented into sequences of words occurring in the corpus, for which translations are determined by subsentential alignment of the sentence pairs containing those sequences. These partial translations are then combined with the results of other translation engines to form the final translation produced by the Pangloss system. In an internal evaluation, PanEBMT achieved 70.2% coverage of unrestricted Spanish news-wire text, despite a simplistic subsentential alignment algorithm, a suboptimal dictionary, and a corpus from a different domain than the evaluation texts.