7,829 research outputs found
Neural Machine Translation into Language Varieties
Both research and commercial machine translation have so far neglected the
importance of properly handling the spelling, lexical and grammar divergences
occurring among language varieties. Notable cases are standard national
varieties such as Brazilian and European Portuguese, and Canadian and European
French, which popular online machine translation services are not keeping
distinct. We show that an evident side effect of modeling such varieties as
unique classes is the generation of inconsistent translations. In this work, we
investigate the problem of training neural machine translation from English to
specific pairs of language varieties, assuming both labeled and unlabeled
parallel texts, and low-resource conditions. We report experiments from English
to two pairs of dialects, EuropeanBrazilian Portuguese and European-Canadian
French, and two pairs of standardized varieties, Croatian-Serbian and
Indonesian-Malay. We show significant BLEU score improvements over baseline
systems when translation into similar languages is learned as a multilingual
task with shared representations.Comment: Published at EMNLP 2018: third conference on machine translation (WMT
2018
Using Resources from a Closely-related Language to Develop ASR for a Very Under-resourced Language: A Case Study for Iban
International audienceThis paper presents our strategies for developing an automatic speech recognition system for Iban, an under-resourced language. We faced several challenges such as no pronunciation dictionary and lack of training material for building acoustic models. To overcome these problems, we proposed approaches which exploit resources from a closely-related language (Malay). We developed a semi-supervised method for building the pronunciation dictionary and applied cross-lingual strategies for improving acoustic models trained with very limited training data. Both approaches displayed very encouraging results, which show that data from a closely-related language, if available, can be exploited to build ASR for a new language. In the final part of the paper, we present a zero-shot ASR using Malay resources that can be used as an alternative method for transcribing Iban speech
Neural Collective Entity Linking
Entity Linking aims to link entity mentions in texts to knowledge bases, and
neural models have achieved recent success in this task. However, most existing
methods rely on local contexts to resolve entities independently, which may
usually fail due to the data sparsity of local information. To address this
issue, we propose a novel neural model for collective entity linking, named as
NCEL. NCEL applies Graph Convolutional Network to integrate both local
contextual features and global coherence information for entity linking. To
improve the computation efficiency, we approximately perform graph convolution
on a subgraph of adjacent entity mentions instead of those in the entire text.
We further introduce an attention scheme to improve the robustness of NCEL to
data noise and train the model on Wikipedia hyperlinks to avoid overfitting and
domain bias. In experiments, we evaluate NCEL on five publicly available
datasets to verify the linking performance as well as generalization ability.
We also conduct an extensive analysis of time complexity, the impact of key
modules, and qualitative results, which demonstrate the effectiveness and
efficiency of our proposed method.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, COLING201
Analysis of Data Augmentation Methods for Low-Resource Maltese ASR
Recent years have seen an increased interest in the computational speech
processing of Maltese, but resources remain sparse. In this paper, we consider
data augmentation techniques for improving speech recognition for low-resource
languages, focusing on Maltese as a test case. We consider three different
types of data augmentation: unsupervised training, multilingual training and
the use of synthesized speech as training data. The goal is to determine which
of these techniques, or combination of them, is the most effective to improve
speech recognition for languages where the starting point is a small corpus of
approximately 7 hours of transcribed speech. Our results show that combining
the data augmentation techniques studied here lead us to an absolute WER
improvement of 15% without the use of a language model.Comment: 12 page
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