This paper presents the NICT's supervised and unsupervised machine translation systems for the WAT2019 Myanmar-English and Khmer-English translation tasks. For all the translation directions, we built state-of-the-art supervised neural (NMT) and statistical (SMT) machine translation systems, using monolingual data cleaned and normalized. Our combination of NMT and SMT performed among the best systems for the four translation directions. We also investigated the feasibility of unsupervised machine translation for lowresource and distant language pairs and confirmed observations of previous work showing that unsupervised MT is still largely unable to deal with them.

As a highly analytic language, Khmer has considerable ambiguities in tokenization and part-of-speech (POS) tagging processing. This topic is investigated in this study. Specifically, a 20,000-sentence Khmer corpus with manual tokenization and POS-tagging annotation is released after a series of work over the last 4 years. This is the largest morphologically annotated Khmer dataset as of 2020, when this article was prepared. Based on the annotated data, experiments were conducted to establish a comprehensive benchmark on the automatic processing of tokenization and POS-tagging for Khmer. Specifically, a support vector machine, a conditional random field (CRF) , a long short-term memory (LSTM) -based recurrent neural network, and an integrated LSTM-CRF model have been investigated and discussed. As a primary conclusion, processing at morpheme-level is satisfactory for the provided data. However, it is intrinsically difficult to identify further grammatical constituents of compounds or phrases because of the complex analytic features of the language. Syntactic annotation and automatic parsing for Khmer will be scheduled in the near future.

Despite the fact that there are a number of researches working on Khmer Language in the field of Natural Language Processing along with some resources regarding words segmentation and POS Tagging, we still lack of high-level resources regarding syntax, Treebanks and grammars, for example. This paper illustrates the semi-automatic framework of constructing Khmer Treebank and the extraction of the Khmer grammar rules from a set of sentences taken from the Khmer grammar books. Initially, these sentences will be manually annotated and processed to generate a number of grammar rules with their probabilities once the Treebank is obtained. In our experiments, the annotated trees and the extracted grammar rules are analyzed in both quantitative and qualitative way. Finally, the results will be evaluated in three evaluation processes including Self-Consistency, 5-Fold Cross-Validation, Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation along with the three validation methods such as Precision, Recall, F1-Measure. According to the result of the three validations, Self-Consistency has shown the best result with more than 92%, followed by the Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation and 5-Fold Cross Validation with the average of 88% and 75% respectively. On the other hand, the crossing bracket data shows that Leave-One-Out Cross Validation holds the highest average with 96% while the other two are 85% and 89%, respectively.

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