Automatic Speech Recognition for Low-resource Languages and Accents Using Multilingual and Crosslingual Information

This thesis explores methods to rapidly bootstrap automatic speech recognition systems for languages, which lack resources for speech and language processing. We focus on finding approaches which allow using data from multiple languages to improve the performance for those languages on different levels, such as feature extraction, acoustic modeling and language modeling. Under application aspects, this thesis also includes research work on non-native and Code-Switching speech

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

Projecting named entity tags from a resource rich language to a resource poor language

Named Entities (NE) are the prominent entities appearing in textual documents.Automatic classification of NE in a textual corpus is a vital process in Information Extraction and Information Retrieval research. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the identification of words in text that correspond to a pre-defined taxonomy such as person, organization, location, date, time, etc.This article focuses on the person (PER), organization (ORG) and location (LOC) entities for a Malay journalistic corpus of terrorism.A projection algorithm, using the Dice Coefficient function and bigram scoring method with domain-specific rules, is suggested to map the NE information from the English corpus to the Malay corpus of terrorism.The English corpus is the translated version of the Malay corpus.Hence, these two corpora are treated as parallel corpora. The method computes the string similarity between the English words and the list of available lexemes in a pre-built lexicon that approximates the best NE mapping.The algorithm has been effectively evaluated using our own terrorism tagged corpus; it achieved satisfactory results in terms of precision, recall, and F-measure.An evaluation of the selected open source NER tool for English is also presented

Proceedings of the COLING 2004 Post Conference Workshop on Multilingual Linguistic Ressources MLR2004

International audienceIn an ever expanding information society, most information systems are now facing the "multilingual challenge". Multilingual language resources play an essential role in modern information systems. Such resources need to provide information on many languages in a common framework and should be (re)usable in many applications (for automatic or human use). Many centres have been involved in national and international projects dedicated to building har- monised language resources and creating expertise in the maintenance and further development of standardised linguistic data. These resources include dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, word-nets, and annotated corpora developed along the lines of best practices and recommendations. However, since the late 90's, most efforts in scaling up these resources remain the responsibility of the local authorities, usually, with very low funding (if any) and few opportunities for academic recognition of this work. Hence, it is not surprising that many of the resource holders and developers have become reluctant to give free access to the latest versions of their resources, and their actual status is therefore currently rather unclear. The goal of this workshop is to study problems involved in the development, management and reuse of lexical resources in a multilingual context. Moreover, this workshop provides a forum for reviewing the present state of language resources. The workshop is meant to bring to the international community qualitative and quantitative information about the most recent developments in the area of linguistic resources and their use in applications. The impressive number of submissions (38) to this workshop and in other workshops and conferences dedicated to similar topics proves that dealing with multilingual linguistic ressources has become a very hot problem in the Natural Language Processing community. To cope with the number of submissions, the workshop organising committee decided to accept 16 papers from 10 countries based on the reviewers' recommendations. Six of these papers will be presented in a poster session. The papers constitute a representative selection of current trends in research on Multilingual Language Resources, such as multilingual aligned corpora, bilingual and multilingual lexicons, and multilingual speech resources. The papers also represent a characteristic set of approaches to the development of multilingual language resources, such as automatic extraction of information from corpora, combination and re-use of existing resources, online collaborative development of multilingual lexicons, and use of the Web as a multilingual language resource. The development and management of multilingual language resources is a long-term activity in which collaboration among researchers is essential. We hope that this workshop will gather many researchers involved in such developments and will give them the opportunity to discuss, exchange, compare their approaches and strengthen their collaborations in the field. The organisation of this workshop would have been impossible without the hard work of the program committee who managed to provide accurate reviews on time, on a rather tight schedule. We would also like to thank the Coling 2004 organising committee that made this workshop possible. Finally, we hope that this workshop will yield fruitful results for all participants

Statistical Models and Search Algorithms for Machine Translation

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Pattern Matching for Translating Domain-Specific Terms from Large Corpora

Translating domain-specific terms is one significant component of machine translation and Machine-aided translation systems. These terms are often not found in standard dictionaries. Human translators, not being experts in every technical or regional domain, cannot produce their translations effectively. Automatic translation of domain-specific terms is therefore highly desirable. Most other work on automatic term translation uses statistical information of words from parallel corpora. Parallel corpora of clean- translated texts are hard to come by whereas there are more noisy- translated texts and many more monolingual texts in various domains. We propose using noisy parallel texts and same-domain texts of a pair of languages to translate terms. In our work, we propose using a novel paradigm of pattern matching of statistical signals of word features. These features are robust to the syntactic structure, character sets, language of the text, and to the domain. We obtain statistical information which is related to the lexical properties of a word and its translation in any other language of the same domain. These lexical properties are extracted from the corpora and represented in vector form. We propose using signal processing techniques for matching these features vectors of a word to those of its translation. Another matching technique we propose is applying discriminative analysis of the word features. For each word, the various features are combined into a single vector which is then transformed into a smaller dimension eigenvector for matching. Since most domain specific terms are nouns and noun phrases, we concentrate on translating English nouns and noun phrases into other languages. We study the relationship between English noun phrases and their translations in Chinese, Japanese and French in parallel corpora. The result of this study is used in our system for translation of English noun phrases into these other languages from noisy parallel and non-parallel corpora

Is Aligning Embedding Spaces a Challenging Task? A Study on Heterogeneous Embedding Alignment Methods

Representation Learning of words and Knowledge Graphs (KG) into low dimensional vector spaces along with its applications to many real-world scenarios have recently gained momentum. In order to make use of multiple KG embeddings for knowledge-driven applications such as question answering, named entity disambiguation, knowledge graph completion, etc., alignment of different KG embedding spaces is necessary. In addition to multilinguality and domain-specific information, different KGs pose the problem of structural differences making the alignment of the KG embeddings more challenging. This paper provides a theoretical analysis and comparison of the state-of-the-art alignment methods between two embedding spaces representing entity-entity and entity-word. This paper also aims at assessing the capability and short-comings of the existing alignment methods on the pretext of different applications