Hybrid rule-based - example-based MT: feeding apertium with sub-sentential translation units

This paper describes a hybrid machine translation (MT) approach that consists of integrating bilingual chunks (sub-sentential translation units) obtained from parallel corpora into an MT system built using the Apertium free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform, which uses a shallow-transfer translation approach. In the integration of bilingual chunks, special care has been taken so as not to break the application of the existing Apertium structural transfer rules, since this would increase the number of ungrammatical translations. The method consists of (i) the application of a dynamic-programming algorithm to compute the best translation coverage of the input sentence given the collection of bilingual chunks available; (ii) the translation of the input sentence as usual by Apertium; and (iii) the application of a language model to choose one of the possible translations for each of the bilingual chunks detected. Results are reported for the translation from English-to-Spanish, and vice versa, when marker-based bilingual chunks automatically obtained from parallel corpora are used

Recent advances in Apertium, a free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform for low-resource languages

This paper presents an overview of Apertium, a free and open-source rule-based machine translation platform. Translation in Apertium happens through a pipeline of modular tools, and the platform continues to be improved as more language pairs are added. Several advances have been implemented since the last publication, including some new optional modules: a module that allows rules to process recursive structures at the structural transfer stage, a module that deals with contiguous and discontiguous multi-word expressions, and a module that resolves anaphora to aid translation. Also highlighted is the hybridisation of Apertium through statistical modules that augment the pipeline, and statistical methods that augment existing modules. This includes morphological disambiguation, weighted structural transfer, and lexical selection modules that learn from limited data. The paper also discusses how a platform like Apertium can be a critical part of access to language technology for so-called low-resource languages, which might be ignored or deemed unapproachable by popular corpus-based translation technologies. Finally, the paper presents some of the released and unreleased language pairs, concluding with a brief look at some supplementary Apertium tools that prove valuable to users as well as language developers. All Apertium-related code, including language data, is free/open-source and available at https://github.com/apertium

Rule-Based Machine Translation From Kazakh To Turkish

This paper presents a shallow-transfer machine translation (MT) system for translating from Kazakh to Turkish. Background on the differences between the languages is presented, followed by how the system was designed to handle some of these differences. The system is based on the Apertium free/open-source machine translation platform. The structure of the system and how it works is described, along with an evaluation against two competing systems. Linguistic components were developed, including a Kazakh-Turkish bilingual dictionary, Constraint Grammar disambiguation rules, lexical selection rules, and structural transfer rules. With many known issues yet to be addressed, our RBMT system has reached performance comparable to publicly-available corpus-based MT systems between the languages

Description of the Chinese-to-Spanish rule-based machine translation system developed with a hybrid combination of human annotation and statistical techniques

Two of the most popular Machine Translation (MT) paradigms are rule based (RBMT) and corpus based, which include the statistical systems (SMT). When scarce parallel corpus is available, RBMT becomes particularly attractive. This is the case of the Chinese--Spanish language pair. This article presents the first RBMT system for Chinese to Spanish. We describe a hybrid method for constructing this system taking advantage of available resources such as parallel corpora that are used to extract dictionaries and lexical and structural transfer rules. The final system is freely available online and open source. Although performance lags behind standard SMT systems for an in-domain test set, the results show that the RBMT’s coverage is competitive and it outperforms the SMT system in an out-of-domain test set. This RBMT system is available to the general public, it can be further enhanced, and it opens up the possibility of creating future hybrid MT systems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Global and local depletion of ternary complex limits translational elongation

The translation of genetic information according to the sequence of the mRNA template occurs with high accuracy and fidelity. Critical events in each single step of translation are selection of transfer RNA (tRNA), codon reading and tRNA-regeneration for a new cycle. We developed a model that accurately describes the dynamics of single elongation steps, thus providing a systematic insight into the sensitivity of the mRNA translation rate to dynamic environmental conditions. Alterations in the concentration of the aminoacylated tRNA can transiently stall the ribosomes during translation which results, as suggested by the model, in two outcomes: either stress-induced change in the tRNA availability triggers the premature termination of the translation and ribosomal dissociation, or extensive demand for one tRNA species results in a competition between frameshift to an aberrant open-reading frame and ribosomal drop-off. Using the bacterial Escherichia coli system, we experimentally draw parallels between these two possible mechanisms

A Peer-to-Peer Middleware Framework for Resilient Persistent Programming

The persistent programming systems of the 1980s offered a programming model that integrated computation and long-term storage. In these systems, reliable applications could be engineered without requiring the programmer to write translation code to manage the transfer of data to and from non-volatile storage. More importantly, it simplified the programmer's conceptual model of an application, and avoided the many coherency problems that result from multiple cached copies of the same information. Although technically innovative, persistent languages were not widely adopted, perhaps due in part to their closed-world model. Each persistent store was located on a single host, and there were no flexible mechanisms for communication or transfer of data between separate stores. Here we re-open the work on persistence and combine it with modern peer-to-peer techniques in order to provide support for orthogonal persistence in resilient and potentially long-running distributed applications. Our vision is of an infrastructure within which an application can be developed and distributed with minimal modification, whereupon the application becomes resilient to certain failure modes. If a node, or the connection to it, fails during execution of the application, the objects are re-instantiated from distributed replicas, without their reference holders being aware of the failure. Furthermore, we believe that this can be achieved within a spectrum of application programmer intervention, ranging from minimal to totally prescriptive, as desired. The same mechanisms encompass an orthogonally persistent programming model. We outline our approach to implementing this vision, and describe current progress.Comment: Submitted to EuroSys 200