38,733 research outputs found
Multi-Retranslation Corpora: Visibility, Variation, Value, and Virtue
Variation among human translations is usually invisible, little understood, and under-valued. Previous statistical research finds that translations vary most where the source items are most semantically significant or express most ‘attitude’ (affect, evaluation, ideology). Understanding how and why translations vary is important for translator training and translation quality assessment, for cultural research, and for machine translation development. Our experimental project began with the intuition that quantitative variation in a corpus of historical retranslations might be used to project quasi-qualitative annotations onto the translated text. We present a web-based system which enables users to create parallel, segment-aligned multi-version corpora, and provides visual interfaces for exploring multiple translations, with their variation projected onto a base text. The system can support any corpus of variant versions. We report experiments using our tools (and stylometric analysis) to investigate a corpus of 40 German versions of a work by Shakespeare. Initial findings lead to more questions than answers
Multi-Retranslation Corpora: Visibility, Variation, Value, and Virtue
Variation among human translations is usually invisible, little understood, and under-valued. Previous statistical research finds that translations vary most where the source items are most semantically significant or express most ‘attitude’ (affect, evaluation, ideology). Understanding how and why translations vary is important for translator training and translation quality assessment, for cultural research, and for machine translation development. Our experimental project began with the intuition that quantitative variation in a corpus of historical retranslations might be used to project quasi-qualitative annotations onto the translated text. We present a web-based system which enables users to create parallel, segment-aligned multi-version corpora, and provides visual interfaces for exploring multiple translations, with their variation projected onto a base text. The system can support any corpus of variant versions. We report experiments using our tools (and stylometric analysis) to investigate a corpus of 40 German versions of a work by Shakespeare. Initial findings lead to more questions than answers
Embedding Web-based Statistical Translation Models in Cross-Language Information Retrieval
Although more and more language pairs are covered by machine translation
services, there are still many pairs that lack translation resources.
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is an application which needs
translation functionality of a relatively low level of sophistication since
current models for information retrieval (IR) are still based on a
bag-of-words. The Web provides a vast resource for the automatic construction
of parallel corpora which can be used to train statistical translation models
automatically. The resulting translation models can be embedded in several ways
in a retrieval model. In this paper, we will investigate the problem of
automatically mining parallel texts from the Web and different ways of
integrating the translation models within the retrieval process. Our
experiments on standard test collections for CLIR show that the Web-based
translation models can surpass commercial MT systems in CLIR tasks. These
results open the perspective of constructing a fully automatic query
translation device for CLIR at a very low cost.Comment: 37 page
Transitive probabilistic CLIR models.
Transitive translation could be a useful technique to enlarge the number of supported language pairs for a cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) system in a cost-effective manner. The paper describes several setups for transitive translation based on probabilistic translation models. The transitive CLIR models were evaluated on the CLEF test collection and yielded a retrieval effectiveness\ud
up to 83% of monolingual performance, which is significantly better than a baseline using the synonym operator
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