41,301 research outputs found
Enhancing scarce-resource language translation through pivot combinations
Chinese and Spanish are the most spoken languages in the world. However, there is not much research done in machine translation for this language pair. We experiment with the parallel Chinese-Spanish corpus (United Nations) to explore alternatives of SMT strategies which consist on using a pivot language. Particularly, two well-known alternatives are shown for pivoting: the cascade system and the pseudo-corpus. As Pivot language we use English, Arabic and French. Results show that English is the best pivot language between Chinese and Spanish. As a new strategy, we propose to perform a combination of the pivot strategies which is capable to highly outperform the direct translation strategy.Postprint (published version
An incremental three-pass system combination framework by combining multiple hypothesis alignment methods
System combination has been applied successfully to various machine translation tasks in recent years. As is known, the hypothesis alignment method is a critical factor for the
translation quality of system combination. To date, many effective hypothesis alignment metrics have been proposed and applied to the system combination, such as TER, HMM,
ITER, IHMM, and SSCI. In addition, Minimum Bayes-risk (MBR) decoding and confusion networks (CN) have become state-of-the-art techniques in system combination. In this paper,
we examine different hypothesis alignment approaches and investigate how much the hypothesis alignment results impact on system combination, and finally present a three-pass system combination strategy that can combine hypothesis alignment results derived from multiple alignment metrics to generate a better translation. Firstly, these different alignment metrics are carried out to align the backbone and hypotheses, and the individual CNs are built corresponding to each set of alignment results; then we construct a âsuper networkâ by merging the multiple metric-based CNs to generate a consensus output. Finally a modified MBR network approach is employed to find the best overall translation. Our proposed strategy outperforms the best single confusion network as well as the best single system in our experiments on the NIST Chinese-to-English test set and the WMT2009 English-to-French system combination shared test set
Corpus Augmentation by Sentence Segmentation for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been proven to achieve impressive
results. The NMT system translation results depend strongly on the size and
quality of parallel corpora. Nevertheless, for many language pairs, no
rich-resource parallel corpora exist. As described in this paper, we propose a
corpus augmentation method by segmenting long sentences in a corpus using
back-translation and generating pseudo-parallel sentence pairs. The experiment
results of the Japanese-Chinese and Chinese-Japanese translation with
Japanese-Chinese scientific paper excerpt corpus (ASPEC-JC) show that the
method improves translation performance.Comment: 4 pages. The version before Applied. Science
Interlingual Lexical Organisation for Multilingual Lexical Databases in NADIA
We propose a lexical organisation for multilingual lexical databases (MLDB).
This organisation is based on acceptions (word-senses). We detail this lexical
organisation and show a mock-up built to experiment with it. We also present
our current work in defining and prototyping a specialised system for the
management of acception-based MLDB. Keywords: multilingual lexical database,
acception, linguistic structure.Comment: 5 pages, Macintosh Postscript, published in COLING-94, pp. 278-28
A Survey of Word Reordering in Statistical Machine Translation: Computational Models and Language Phenomena
Word reordering is one of the most difficult aspects of statistical machine
translation (SMT), and an important factor of its quality and efficiency.
Despite the vast amount of research published to date, the interest of the
community in this problem has not decreased, and no single method appears to be
strongly dominant across language pairs. Instead, the choice of the optimal
approach for a new translation task still seems to be mostly driven by
empirical trials. To orientate the reader in this vast and complex research
area, we present a comprehensive survey of word reordering viewed as a
statistical modeling challenge and as a natural language phenomenon. The survey
describes in detail how word reordering is modeled within different
string-based and tree-based SMT frameworks and as a stand-alone task, including
systematic overviews of the literature in advanced reordering modeling. We then
question why some approaches are more successful than others in different
language pairs. We argue that, besides measuring the amount of reordering, it
is important to understand which kinds of reordering occur in a given language
pair. To this end, we conduct a qualitative analysis of word reordering
phenomena in a diverse sample of language pairs, based on a large collection of
linguistic knowledge. Empirical results in the SMT literature are shown to
support the hypothesis that a few linguistic facts can be very useful to
anticipate the reordering characteristics of a language pair and to select the
SMT framework that best suits them.Comment: 44 pages, to appear in Computational Linguistic
Cross-lingual Argumentation Mining: Machine Translation (and a bit of Projection) is All You Need!
Argumentation mining (AM) requires the identification of complex discourse
structures and has lately been applied with success monolingually. In this
work, we show that the existing resources are, however, not adequate for
assessing cross-lingual AM, due to their heterogeneity or lack of complexity.
We therefore create suitable parallel corpora by (human and machine)
translating a popular AM dataset consisting of persuasive student essays into
German, French, Spanish, and Chinese. We then compare (i) annotation projection
and (ii) bilingual word embeddings based direct transfer strategies for
cross-lingual AM, finding that the former performs considerably better and
almost eliminates the loss from cross-lingual transfer. Moreover, we find that
annotation projection works equally well when using either costly human or
cheap machine translations. Our code and data are available at
\url{http://github.com/UKPLab/coling2018-xling_argument_mining}.Comment: Accepted at Coling 201
Termhood-based Comparability Metrics of Comparable Corpus in Special Domain
Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) and machine translation (MT)
resources, such as dictionaries and parallel corpora, are scarce and hard to
come by for special domains. Besides, these resources are just limited to a few
languages, such as English, French, and Spanish and so on. So, obtaining
comparable corpora automatically for such domains could be an answer to this
problem effectively. Comparable corpora, that the subcorpora are not
translations of each other, can be easily obtained from web. Therefore,
building and using comparable corpora is often a more feasible option in
multilingual information processing. Comparability metrics is one of key issues
in the field of building and using comparable corpus. Currently, there is no
widely accepted definition or metrics method of corpus comparability. In fact,
Different definitions or metrics methods of comparability might be given to
suit various tasks about natural language processing. A new comparability,
namely, termhood-based metrics, oriented to the task of bilingual terminology
extraction, is proposed in this paper. In this method, words are ranked by
termhood not frequency, and then the cosine similarities, calculated based on
the ranking lists of word termhood, is used as comparability. Experiments
results show that termhood-based metrics performs better than traditional
frequency-based metrics
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