Machine translation evaluation resources and methods: a survey

We introduce the Machine Translation (MT) evaluation survey that contains both manual and automatic evaluation methods. The traditional human evaluation criteria mainly include the intelligibility, fidelity, fluency, adequacy, comprehension, and informativeness. The advanced human assessments include task-oriented measures, post-editing, segment ranking, and extended criteriea, etc. We classify the automatic evaluation methods into two categories, including lexical similarity scenario and linguistic features application. The lexical similarity methods contain edit distance, precision, recall, F-measure, and word order. The linguistic features can be divided into syntactic features and semantic features respectively. The syntactic features include part of speech tag, phrase types and sentence structures, and the semantic features include named entity, synonyms, textual entailment, paraphrase, semantic roles, and language models. The deep learning models for evaluation are very newly proposed. Subsequently, we also introduce the evaluation methods for MT evaluation including different correlation scores, and the recent quality estimation (QE) tasks for MT. This paper differs from the existing works\cite {GALEprogram2009, EuroMatrixProject2007} from several aspects, by introducing some recent development of MT evaluation measures, the different classifications from manual to automatic evaluation measures, the introduction of recent QE tasks of MT, and the concise construction of the content

Beyond Extractive: Advancing Abstractive Automatic Text Summarization in Norwegian with Transformers

Automatic summarization is a key area in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning which attempts to generate informative summaries of articles and documents. Despite its evolution since the 1950s, research on automatically summarising Norwegian text has remained relatively underdeveloped. Though there have been some strides made in extractive systems, which generate summaries by selecting and condensing key phrases directly from the source material, the field of abstractive summarization remains unexplored for the Norwegian language. Abstractive summarization is distinct as it generates summaries incorporating new words and phrases not present in the original text. This Master's thesis revolves around one key question: Is it possible to create a machine learning system capable of performing abstractive summarization in Norwegian? To answer this question, we generate and release the first two Norwegian datasets for creating and evaluating Norwegian summarization models. One of these datasets is a web scrape of Store Norske Leksikon (SNL), and the other is a machine-translated version of CNN/Daily Mail. Using these datasets, we fine-tune two Norwegian T5 language models with 580M and 1.2B parameters to create summaries. To assess the quality of the models, we employed both automatic ROUGE scores and human evaluations on the generated summaries. In an effort to better understand the model's behaviour, we measure how a model generates summaries with various metrics, including our own novel contribution which we name "Match Ratio" which measures sentence similarities between summaries and articles based on Levenshtein distances. The top-performing models achieved ROUGE-1 scores of 35.07 and 34.02 on SNL and CNN/DM, respectively. In terms of human evaluation, the best model yielded an average score of 3.96/5.00 for SNL and 4.64/5.00 for CNN/Daily Mail across various criteria. Based on these results, we conclude that it is possible to perform abstractive summarization of Norwegian with high-quality summaries. With this research, we have laid a foundation that hopefully will facilitate future research, empowering others to build upon our findings and contribute further to the development of Norwegian summarization models

Automatic abstracting: a review and an empirical evaluation

The abstract is a fundamental tool in information retrieval. As condensed representations, they facilitate conservation of the increasingly precious search time and space of scholars, allowing them to manage more effectively an ever-growing deluge of documentation. Traditionally the product of human intellectual effort, attempts to automate the abstracting process began in 1958. Two identifiable automatic abstracting techniques emerged which reflect differing levels of ambition regarding simulation of the human abstracting process, namely sentence extraction and text summarisation. This research paradigm has recently diversified further, with a cross-fertilisation of methods. Commercial systems are beginning to appear, but automatic abstracting is still mainly confined to an experimental arena. The purpose of this study is firstly to chart the historical development and current state of both manual and automatic abstracting; and secondly, to devise and implement an empirical user-based evaluation to assess the adequacy of automatic abstracts derived from sentence extraction techniques according to a set of utility criteria. [Continues.

Application of fuzzy sets in data-to-text system

This PhD dissertation addresses the convergence of two distinct paradigms: fuzzy sets and natural language generation. The object of study is the integration of fuzzy set-derived techniques that model imprecision and uncertainty in human language into systems that generate textual information from numeric data, commonly known as data-to-text systems. This dissertation covers an extensive state of the art review, potential convergence points, two real data-to-text applications that integrate fuzzy sets (in the meteorology and learning analytics domains), and a model that encompasses the most relevant elements in the linguistic description of data discipline and provides a framework for building and integrating fuzzy set-based approaches into natural language generation/data-to-ext systems

NLP Driven Models for Automatically Generating Survey Articles for Scientific Topics.

This thesis presents new methods that use natural language processing (NLP) driven models for summarizing research in scientific fields. Given a topic query in the form of a text string, we present methods for finding research articles relevant to the topic as well as summarization algorithms that use lexical and discourse information present in the text of these articles to generate coherent and readable extractive summaries of past research on the topic. In addition to summarizing prior research, good survey articles should also forecast future trends. With this motivation, we present work on forecasting future impact of scientific publications using NLP driven features.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113407/1/rahuljha_1.pd

POLIS: a probabilistic summarisation logic for structured documents

PhDAs the availability of structured documents, formatted in markup languages such as SGML, RDF, or XML, increases, retrieval systems increasingly focus on the retrieval of document-elements, rather than entire documents. Additionally, abstraction layers in the form of formalised retrieval logics have allowed developers to include search facilities into numerous applications, without the need of having detailed knowledge of retrieval models. Although automatic document summarisation has been recognised as a useful tool for reducing the workload of information system users, very few such abstraction layers have been developed for the task of automatic document summarisation. This thesis describes the development of an abstraction logic for summarisation, called POLIS, which provides users (such as developers or knowledge engineers) with a high-level access to summarisation facilities. Furthermore, POLIS allows users to exploit the hierarchical information provided by structured documents. The development of POLIS is carried out in a step-by-step way. We start by defining a series of probabilistic summarisation models, which provide weights to document-elements at a user selected level. These summarisation models are those accessible through POLIS. The formal definition of POLIS is performed in three steps. We start by providing a syntax for POLIS, through which users/knowledge engineers interact with the logic. This is followed by a definition of the logics semantics. Finally, we provide details of an implementation of POLIS. The final chapters of this dissertation are concerned with the evaluation of POLIS, which is conducted in two stages. Firstly, we evaluate the performance of the summarisation models by applying POLIS to two test collections, the DUC AQUAINT corpus, and the INEX IEEE corpus. This is followed by application scenarios for POLIS, in which we discuss how POLIS can be used in specific IR tasks