A MT System from Turkmen to Turkish employing finite state and statistical methods

In this work, we present a MT system from Turkmen to Turkish. Our system exploits the similarity of the languages by using a modified version of direct translation method. However, the complex inflectional and derivational morphology of the Turkic languages necessitate special treatment for word-by-word translation model. We also employ morphology-aware multi-word processing and statistical disambiguation processes in our system. We believe that this approach is valid for most of the Turkic languages and the architecture implemented using FSTs can be easily extended to those languages

Getting Past the Language Gap: Innovations in Machine Translation

In this chapter, we will be reviewing state of the art machine translation systems, and will discuss innovative methods for machine translation, highlighting the most promising techniques and applications. Machine translation (MT) has benefited from a revitalization in the last 10 years or so, after a period of relatively slow activity. In 2005 the field received a jumpstart when a powerful complete experimental package for building MT systems from scratch became freely available as a result of the unified efforts of the MOSES international consortium. Around the same time, hierarchical methods had been introduced by Chinese researchers, which allowed the introduction and use of syntactic information in translation modeling. Furthermore, the advances in the related field of computational linguistics, making off-the-shelf taggers and parsers readily available, helped give MT an additional boost. Yet there is still more progress to be made. For example, MT will be enhanced greatly when both syntax and semantics are on board: this still presents a major challenge though many advanced research groups are currently pursuing ways to meet this challenge head-on. The next generation of MT will consist of a collection of hybrid systems. It also augurs well for the mobile environment, as we look forward to more advanced and improved technologies that enable the working of Speech-To-Speech machine translation on hand-held devices, i.e. speech recognition and speech synthesis. We review all of these developments and point out in the final section some of the most promising research avenues for the future of MT

Improving the precision of example-based machine translation by learning from user feedback

Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and the Institute of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2007.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2007.Includes bibliographical references leaves 110-113Example-Based Machine Translation (EBMT) is a corpus based approach to Machine Translation (MT), that utilizes the translation by analogy concept. In our EBMT system, translation templates are extracted automatically from bilingual aligned corpora, by substituting the similarities and differences in pairs of translation examples with variables. As this process is done on the lexical-level forms of the translation examples, and words in natural language texts are often morphologically ambiguous, a need for morphological disambiguation arises. Therefore, we present here a rule-based morphological disambiguator for Turkish. In earlier versions of the discussed system, the translation results were solely ranked using confidence factors of the translation templates. In this study, however, we introduce an improved ranking mechanism that dynamically learns from user feedback. When a user, such as a professional human translator, submits his evaluation of the generated translation results, the system learns “contextdependent co-occurrence rules” from this feedback. The newly learned rules are later consulted, while ranking the results of the following translations. Through successive translation-evaluation cycles, we expect that the output of the ranking mechanism complies better with user expectations, listing the more preferred results in higher ranks. The evaluation of our ranking method, using the precision value at top 1, 3 and 5 results and the BLEU metric, is also presented.Daybelge, Turhan OsmanM.S

Using domain specific language and sequence to sequence models as a hybrid framework for a natural language interface to a database solution

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe aim of this project is to provide a new approach to solving the problem of converting natural language into a language capable of querying a database or data repository. This problem has been around for a while, in the 1970's the US Navy developed a solution called LADDER and since then there have been an array of solutions, approaches and tweaks that have kept the research community busy. The introduction of electronic assistants into the smart phone in 2010 has given new impetus to this problem. With the increasingly pervasive nature of data and its ever expanding use to answer questions within business science, medicine extracting data is becoming more important. The idea behind this project is to make data more democratised by allowing access to it without the need for specialist languages. The performance and reliability of converting natural language into structured query language can be problematic in handling nuances that are prevalent in natural language. Relational databases are not designed to understand language nuance. This project introduces the following components as part of a holistic approach to improving the conversion of a natural language statement into a language capable of querying a data repository. ● The idea proposed in this project combines the use of sequence to sequence models in conjunction with the natural language part of speech technologies and domain specific languages to convert natural language queries into SQL. The approach being proposed by this chapter is to use natural language processing to perform an initial shallow pass of the incoming query and then use Google's Tensor Flow to refine the query with the use of a sequence to sequence model. ● This thesis is also proposing to use a Domain Specific Language (DSL) as part of the conversion process. The use of the DSL has the potential to allow the natural language query to be translated into more than just an SQL statement, but any query language such as NoSQL or XQuery

Zināšanās bāzētu un korpusā bāzētu metožu kombinētā izmantošanas mašīntulkošanā

ANOTĀCIJA. Mašīntulkošanas (MT) sistēmas tiek būvētas izmantojot dažādas metodes (zināšanās un korpusā bāzētas). Zināšanās bāzēta MT tulko tekstu, izmantojot cilvēka rakstītus likumus. Korpusā bāzēta MT izmanto no tulkojumu piemēriem automātiski izgūtus modeļus. Abām metodēm ir gan priekšrocības, gan trūkumi. Šajā darbā tiek meklēta kombināta metode MT kvalitātes uzlabošanai, kombinējot abas metodes. Darbā tiek pētīta metožu piemērotība latviešu valodai, kas ir maza, morfoloģiski bagāta valoda ar ierobežotiem resursiem. Tiek analizētas esošās metodes un tiek piedāvātas vairākas kombinētās metodes. Metodes ir realizētas un novērtētas, izmantojot gan automātiskas, gan cilvēka novērtēšanas metodes. Faktorēta statistiskā MT ar zināšanās balstītu morfoloģisko analizatoru ir piedāvāta kā perspektīvākā. Darbā aprakstīts arī metodes praktiskais pielietojums. Atslēgas vārdi: mašīntulkošana (MT), zināšanās balstīta MT, korpusā balstīta MT, kombinēta metodeABSTRACT. Machine Translation (MT) systems are built using different methods (knowledge-based and corpus-based). Knowledge-based MT translates text using human created rules. Corpus-based MT uses models which are automatically built from translation examples. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. This work aims to find a combined method to improve the MT quality combining both methods. An applicability of the methods for Latvian (a small, morphologically rich, under-resourced language) is researched. The existing MT methods have been analyzed and several combined methods have been proposed. Methods have been implemented and evaluated using an automatic and human evaluation. The factored statistical MT with a rule-based morphological analyzer is proposed to be the most promising. The practical application of methods is described. Keywords: Machine Translation (MT), Rule-based MT, Statistical MT, Combined approac

Approaches to Machine Translation: A Review

Translation is the transfer of the meaning of a text from one language to another. It is a means of sharing information across languages and therefore essential for addressing information inequalities. The work of translation was originally carried out by human translators and its limitations led to the development of machine translators. Machine Translation is a subfield of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. There are different approaches to machine translation. This paper reviews the two major approaches (single vs. hybrid) to machine translation and provides critique of existing machine translation systems with their merits and demerits. Several application areas of machine translation and various methods used in evaluating them were also discussed. Our conclusion from the reviewed literatures is that a single approach to machine translation fails to achieve satisfactory performance resulting in lower quality and fluency of the output. On the other hand, a hybrid approach combines the strength of two or more approaches to improve the overall quality and fluency of the translation

Treebank-based acquisition of Chinese LFG resources for parsing and generation

This thesis describes a treebank-based approach to automatically acquire robust,wide-coverage Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) resources for Chinese parsing and generation, which is part of a larger project on the rapid construction of deep, large-scale, constraint-based, multilingual grammatical resources. I present an application-oriented LFG analysis for Chinese core linguistic phenomena and (in cooperation with PARC) develop a gold-standard dependency-bank of Chinese f-structures for evaluation. Based on the Penn Chinese Treebank, I design and implement two architectures for inducing Chinese LFG resources, one annotation-based and the other dependency conversion-based. I then apply the f-structure acquisition algorithm together with external, state-of-the-art parsers to parsing new text into "proto" f-structures. In order to convert "proto" f-structures into "proper" f-structures or deep dependencies, I present a novel Non-Local Dependency (NLD) recovery algorithm using subcategorisation frames and f-structure paths linking antecedents and traces in NLDs extracted from the automatically-built LFG f-structure treebank. Based on the grammars extracted from the f-structure annotated treebank, I develop a PCFG-based chart generator and a new n-gram based pure dependency generator to realise Chinese sentences from LFG f-structures. The work reported in this thesis is the first effort to scale treebank-based, probabilistic Chinese LFG resources from proof-of-concept research to unrestricted, real text. Although this thesis concentrates on Chinese and LFG, many of the methodologies, e.g. the acquisition of predicate-argument structures, NLD resolution and the PCFG- and dependency n-gram-based generation models, are largely language and formalism independent and should generalise to diverse languages as well as to labelled bilexical dependency representations other than LFG

Designing Statistical Language Learners: Experiments on Noun Compounds

The goal of this thesis is to advance the exploration of the statistical language learning design space. In pursuit of that goal, the thesis makes two main theoretical contributions: (i) it identifies a new class of designs by specifying an architecture for natural language analysis in which probabilities are given to semantic forms rather than to more superficial linguistic elements; and (ii) it explores the development of a mathematical theory to predict the expected accuracy of statistical language learning systems in terms of the volume of data used to train them. The theoretical work is illustrated by applying statistical language learning designs to the analysis of noun compounds. Both syntactic and semantic analysis of noun compounds are attempted using the proposed architecture. Empirical comparisons demonstrate that the proposed syntactic model is significantly better than those previously suggested, approaching the performance of human judges on the same task, and that the proposed semantic model, the first statistical approach to this problem, exhibits significantly better accuracy than the baseline strategy. These results suggest that the new class of designs identified is a promising one. The experiments also serve to highlight the need for a widely applicable theory of data requirements.Comment: PhD thesis (Macquarie University, Sydney; December 1995), LaTeX source, xii+214 page

Unsupervised Syntactic Structure Induction in Natural Language Processing

This work addresses unsupervised chunking as a task for syntactic structure induction, which could help understand the linguistic structures of human languages especially, low-resource languages. In chunking, words of a sentence are grouped together into different phrases (also known as chunks) in a non-hierarchical fashion. Understanding text fundamentally requires finding noun and verb phrases, which makes unsupervised chunking an important step in several real-world applications. In this thesis, we establish several baselines and discuss our three-step knowledge transfer approach for unsupervised chunking. In the first step, we take advantage of state-of-the-art unsupervised parsers, and in the second, we heuristically induce chunk labels from them. We propose a simple heuristic that does not require any supervision of annotated grammar and generates reasonable (albeit noisy) chunks. In the third step, we design a hierarchical recurrent neural network (HRNN) that learns from these pseudo ground-truth labels. The HRNN explicitly models the composition of words into chunks and smooths out the noise from heuristically induced labels. Our HRNN a) maintains both word-level and phrase-level representations and b) explicitly handles the chunking decisions by providing autoregressiveness at each step. Furthermore, we make a case for exploring the self-supervised learning objectives for unsupervised chunking. Finally, we discuss our attempt to transfer knowledge from chunking back to parsing in an unsupervised setting. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three datasets: CoNLL-2000 (English), CoNLL-2003 (German), and the English Web Treebank. Results show that our HRNN improves upon the teacher model (Compound PCFG) in terms of both phrase F1 and tag accuracy. Our HRNN can smooth out the noise from induced chunk labels and accurately capture the chunking patterns. We evaluate different chunking heuristics and show that maximal left-branching performs the best, reinforcing the fact that left-branching structures indicate closely related words. We also present rigorous analysis on the HRNN's architecture and discuss the performance of vanilla recurrent neural networks