Clause Restructuring in English-Swedish Translation

Proceedings of the Workshop on Annotation and Exploitation of Parallel Corpora AEPC 2010. Editors: Lars Ahrenberg, Jörg Tiedemann and Martin Volk. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 10 (2010), 34-43. © 2010 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15893

Machine translation of TV subtitles for large scale production

This paper describes our work on building and employing Statistical Machine Translation systems for TV subtitles in Scandinavia. We have built translation systems for Danish, English, Norwegian and Swedish. They are used in daily subtitle production and translate large volumes. As an example we report on our evaluation results for three TV genres. We discuss our lessons learned in the system development process which shed interesting light on the practical use of Machine Translation technology

A Fast Method for Parallel Document Identification

We present a fast method to identify homogeneous parallel documents. The method is based on collecting counts of identical low-frequency words between possibly parallel documents. The candidate with the most shared low-frequency words is selected as the parallel document. The method achieved 99.96% accuracy when tested on the EUROPARL corpus of parliamentary proceedings, failing only in anomalous cases of truncated or otherwise distorted documents. While other work has shown similar performance on this type of dataset, our approach presented here is faster and does not require training. Apart from proposing an efficient method for parallel document identification in a restricted domain, this paper furnishes evidence that parliamentary proceedings may be inappropriate for testing parallel document identification systems in general

A Fast Method for Parallel Document Identification

We present a fast method to identify homogeneous parallel documents. The method is based on collecting counts of identical low-frequency words between possibly parallel documents. The candidate with the most shared low-frequency words is selected as the parallel document. The method achieved 99.96% accuracy when tested on the EUROPARL corpus of parliamentary proceedings, failing only in anomalous cases of truncated or otherwise distorted documents. While other work has shown similar performance on this type of dataset, our approach presented here is faster and does not require training. Apart from proposing an efficient method for parallel document identification in a restricted domain, this paper furnishes evidence that parliamentary proceedings may be inappropriate for testing parallel document identification systems in general

Proceedings

Proceedings of the Workshop on Annotation and Exploitation of Parallel Corpora AEPC 2010. Editors: Lars Ahrenberg, Jörg Tiedemann and Martin Volk. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 10 (2010), 98 pages. © 2010 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15893

Understanding Word Embedding Stability Across Languages and Applications

Despite the recent popularity of word embedding methods, there is only a small body of work exploring the limitations of these representations. In this thesis, we consider several aspects of embedding spaces, including their stability. First, we propose a definition of stability, and show that common English word embeddings are surprisingly unstable. We explore how properties of data, words, and algorithms relate to instability. We extend this work to approximately 100 world languages, considering how linguistic typology relates to stability. Additionally, we consider contextualized output embedding spaces. Using paraphrases, we explore properties and assumptions of BERT, a popular embedding algorithm. Second, we consider how stability and other word embedding properties affect tasks where embeddings are commonly used. We consider both word embeddings used as features in downstream applications and corpus-centered applications, where embeddings are used to study characteristics of language and individual writers. In addition to stability, we also consider other word embedding properties, specifically batching and curriculum learning, and how methodological choices made for these properties affect downstream tasks. Finally, we consider how knowledge of stability affects how we use word embeddings. Throughout this thesis, we discuss strategies to mitigate instability and provide analyses highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of word embeddings in different scenarios and languages. We show areas where more work is needed to improve embeddings, and we show where embeddings are already a strong tool.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162917/1/lburdick_1.pd

A low variance consistent test of relative dependency

We describe a novel non-parametric statistical hypothesis test of relative dependence between a source variable and two candidate target variables. Such a test enables us to determine whether one source variable is significantly more dependent on a first target variable or a second. Dependence is measured via the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), resulting in a pair of empirical dependence measures (source-target 1, source-target 2). We test whether the first dependence measure is significantly larger than the second. Modeling the covariance between these HSIC statistics leads to a provably more powerful test than the construction of independent HSIC statistics by sub-sampling. The resulting test is consistent and unbiased, and (being based on U-statistics) has favorable convergence properties. The test can be computed in quadratic time, matching the computational complexity of standard empirical HSIC estimators. The effectiveness of the test is demonstrated on several real-world problems: we identify language groups from a multilingual corpus, and we prove that tumor location is more dependent on gene expression than chromosomal imbalances. Source code is available for download at https://github.com/wbounliphone/reldep.Comment: International Conference on Machine Learning, Jul 2015, Lille, Franc

Sub-sentential alignment of translational correspondences

The focus of this thesis is sub-sentential alignment, i.e. the automatic alignment of translational correspondences below sentence level. The system that we developed takes as its input sentence-aligned parallel texts and aligns translational correspondences at the sub-sentential level, which can be words, word groups or chunks. The research described in this thesis aims to be of value to the developers of computer-assisted translation tools and to human translators in general. Two important aspects of this research are its focus on different text types and its focus on precision. In order to cover a wide range of syntactic and stylistic phenomena that emerge from different writing and translation styles, we used parallel texts of different text types. As the intended users are ultimately human translators, our explicit aim was to develop a model that aligns segments with a very high precision. This thesis consists of three major parts. The first part is introductory and focuses on the manual annotation, the resources used and the evaluation methodology. The second part forms the main contribution of this thesis and describes the sub-sentential alignment system that was developed. In the third part, two different applications are discussed. Although the global architecture of our sub-sentential alignment module is language-independent, the main focus is on the English-Dutch language pair. At the beginning of the research project, a Gold Standard was created. The manual reference corpus contains three different types of links: regular links for straightforward correspondences, fuzzy links for translation-specific shifts of various kinds, and null links for words for which no correspondence could be indicated. The different writing and translation styles in the different text types was reflected in the number of regular, fuzzy and null links. The sub-sentential alignment system is conceived as a cascaded model consisting of two phases. In the first phase, anchor chunks are linked on the basis of lexical correspondences and syntactic similarity. In the second phase, we use a bootstrapping approach to extract language-pair specific translation patterns. The alignment system is chunk-driven and requires only shallow linguistic processing tools for the source and the target languages, i.e. part-of-speech taggers and chunkers. To generate the lexical correspondences, we experimented with two different types of bilingual dictionaries: a handcrafted bilingual dictionary and probabilistic bilingual dictionaries. In the bootstrapping experiments, we started from the precise GIZA++ intersected word alignments. The proposed system improves the recall of the intersected GIZA++ word alignments without sacrificing precision, which makes the resulting alignments more useful for incorporation in CAT-tools or bilingual terminology extraction tools. Moreover, the system's ability to align discontiguous chunks makes the system useful for languages containing split verbal constructions and phrasal verbs. In the last part of this thesis, we demonstrate the usefulness of the sub-sentential alignment module in two different applications. First, we used the sub-sentential alignment module to guide bilingual terminology extraction on three different language pairs, viz. French-English, French-Italian and French-Dutch. Second, we compare the performance of our alignment system with a commercial sub-sentential translation memory system

Recycling texts: human evaluation of example-based machine translation subtitles for DVD

This project focuses on translation reusability in audiovisual contexts. Specifically, the project seeks to establish (1) whether target language subtitles produced by an EBMT system are considered intelligible and acceptable by viewers of movies on DVD, and (2)whether a relationship exists between the ‘profiles’ of corpora used to train an EBMT system, on the one hand, and viewers’ judgements of the intelligibility and acceptability of the subtitles produced by the system, on the other. The impact of other factors, namely: whether movie-viewing subjects have knowledge of the soundtrack language; subjects’ linguistic background; and subjects’ prior knowledge of the (Harry Potter) movie clips viewed; is also investigated. Corpus profiling is based on measurements (partly using corpus-analysis tools) of three characteristics of the corpora used to train the EBMT system: the number of source language repetitions they contain; the size of the corpus; and the homogeneity of the corpus (independent variables). As a quality control measure in this prospective profiling phase, we also elicit human judgements (through a combined questionnaire and interview) on the quality of the corpus data and on the reusability in new contexts of the TL subtitles. The intelligibility and acceptability of EBMT-produced subtitles (dependent variables) are, in turn, established through end-user evaluation sessions. In these sessions 44 native German-speaking subjects view short movie clips containing EBMT-generated German subtitles, and following each clip answer questions (again, through a combined questionnaire and interview) relating to the quality characteristics mentioned above. The findings of the study suggest that an increase in corpus size along with a concomitant increase in the number of source language repetitions and a decrease in corpus homogeneity, improves the readability of the EBMT-generated subtitles. It does not, however, have a significant effect on the comprehensibility, style or wellformedness of the EBMT-generated subtitles. Increasing corpus size and SL repetitions also results in a higher number of alternative TL translations in the corpus that are deemed acceptable by evaluators in the corpus profiling phase. The research also finds that subjects are more critical of subtitles when they do not understand the soundtrack language, while subjects’ linguistic background does not have a significant effect on their judgements of the quality of EBMT-generated subtitles. Prior knowledge of the Harry Potter genre, on the other hand, appears to have an effect on how viewing subjects rate the severity of observed errors in the subtitles, and on how they rate the style of subtitles, although this effect is training corpus-dependent. The introduction of repeated subtitles did not reduce the intelligibility or acceptability of the subtitles. Overall, the findings indicate that the subtitles deemed the most acceptable when evaluated in a non-AVT environment (albeit one in which rich contextual information was available) were the same as the subtitles deemed the most acceptable in an AVT environment, although richer data were gathered from the AVT environment