1,119 research outputs found
Reordering of Source Side for a Factored English to Manipuri SMT System
Similar languages with massive parallel corpora are readily implemented by large-scale systems using either Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) or Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Translations involving low-resource language pairs with linguistic divergence have always been a challenge. We consider one such pair, English-Manipuri, which shows linguistic divergence and belongs to the low resource category. For such language pairs, SMT gets better acclamation than NMT. However, SMT’s more prominent phrase- based model uses groupings of surface word forms treated as phrases for translation. Therefore, without any linguistic knowledge, it fails to learn a proper mapping between the source and target language symbols. Our model adopts a factored model of SMT (FSMT3*) with a part-of-speech (POS) tag as a factor to incorporate linguistic information about the languages followed by hand-coded reordering. The reordering of source sentences makes them similar to the target language allowing better mapping between source and target symbols. The reordering also converts long-distance reordering problems to monotone reordering that SMT models can better handle, thereby reducing the load during decoding time. Additionally, we discover that adding a POS feature data enhances the system’s precision. Experimental results using automatic evaluation metrics show that our model improved over phrase-based and other factored models using the lexicalised Moses reordering options. Our FSMT3* model shows an increase in the automatic scores of translation result over the factored model with lexicalised phrase reordering (FSMT2) by an amount of 11.05% (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy), 5.46% (F1), 9.35% (Precision), and 2.56% (Recall), respectively
Revisiting Low Resource Status of Indian Languages in Machine Translation
Indian language machine translation performance is hampered due to the lack
of large scale multi-lingual sentence aligned corpora and robust benchmarks.
Through this paper, we provide and analyse an automated framework to obtain
such a corpus for Indian language neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Our
pipeline consists of a baseline NMT system, a retrieval module, and an
alignment module that is used to work with publicly available websites such as
press releases by the government. The main contribution towards this effort is
to obtain an incremental method that uses the above pipeline to iteratively
improve the size of the corpus as well as improve each of the components of our
system. Through our work, we also evaluate the design choices such as the
choice of pivoting language and the effect of iterative incremental increase in
corpus size. Our work in addition to providing an automated framework also
results in generating a relatively larger corpus as compared to existing
corpora that are available for Indian languages. This corpus helps us obtain
substantially improved results on the publicly available WAT evaluation
benchmark and other standard evaluation benchmarks.Comment: 10 pages, few figures, Preprint under revie
Improving Zero-Shot Translation by Disentangling Positional Information
Multilingual neural machine translation has shown the capability of directly
translating between language pairs unseen in training, i.e. zero-shot
translation. Despite being conceptually attractive, it often suffers from low
output quality. The difficulty of generalizing to new translation directions
suggests the model representations are highly specific to those language pairs
seen in training. We demonstrate that a main factor causing the
language-specific representations is the positional correspondence to input
tokens. We show that this can be easily alleviated by removing residual
connections in an encoder layer. With this modification, we gain up to 18.5
BLEU points on zero-shot translation while retaining quality on supervised
directions. The improvements are particularly prominent between related
languages, where our proposed model outperforms pivot-based translation.
Moreover, our approach allows easy integration of new languages, which
substantially expands translation coverage. By thorough inspections of the
hidden layer outputs, we show that our approach indeed leads to more
language-independent representations.Comment: ACL 202
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