13,632 research outputs found
Structured local exponential models for machine translation
This thesis proposes a synthesis and generalization of local exponential translation models, the subclass of feature-rich translation models which associate probability distributions with individual rewrite rules used by the translation system, such as synchronous context-free rules, or with other individual aspects of translation hypotheses such as word pairs or reordering events. Unlike other authors we use these estimates to replace the traditional phrase models and lexical scores, rather than in addition to them, thereby demonstrating that the local exponential phrase models can be regarded as a generalization of standard methods not only in theoretical but also in practical terms. We further introduce a form of local translation models that combine features associated with surface forms of rules and features associated with less specific representation -- including those based on lemmas, inflections, and reordering patterns -- such that surface-form estimates are recovered as a special case of the model. Crucially, the proposed approach allows estimation of parameters for the latter type of features from training sets that include multiple source phrases, thereby overcoming an important training set fragmentation problem which hampers previously proposed local translation models. These proposals are experimentally validated. Conditioning all phrase-based probabilities in a hierarchical phrase-based system on source-side contextual information produces significant performance improvements. Extending the contextually-sensitive estimates with features modeling source-side morphology and reordering patterns yields consistent additional improvements, while further experiments show significant improvements obtained from modeling observed and unobserved inflections for a morphologically rich target language
Target-Side Context for Discriminative Models in Statistical Machine Translation
Discriminative translation models utilizing source context have been shown to
help statistical machine translation performance. We propose a novel extension
of this work using target context information. Surprisingly, we show that this
model can be efficiently integrated directly in the decoding process. Our
approach scales to large training data sizes and results in consistent
improvements in translation quality on four language pairs. We also provide an
analysis comparing the strengths of the baseline source-context model with our
extended source-context and target-context model and we show that our extension
allows us to better capture morphological coherence. Our work is freely
available as part of Moses.Comment: Accepted as a long paper for ACL 201
Learning neural trans-dimensional random field language models with noise-contrastive estimation
Trans-dimensional random field language models (TRF LMs) where sentences are
modeled as a collection of random fields, have shown close performance with
LSTM LMs in speech recognition and are computationally more efficient in
inference. However, the training efficiency of neural TRF LMs is not
satisfactory, which limits the scalability of TRF LMs on large training corpus.
In this paper, several techniques on both model formulation and parameter
estimation are proposed to improve the training efficiency and the performance
of neural TRF LMs. First, TRFs are reformulated in the form of exponential
tilting of a reference distribution. Second, noise-contrastive estimation (NCE)
is introduced to jointly estimate the model parameters and normalization
constants. Third, we extend the neural TRF LMs by marrying the deep
convolutional neural network (CNN) and the bidirectional LSTM into the
potential function to extract the deep hierarchical features and
bidirectionally sequential features. Utilizing all the above techniques enables
the successful and efficient training of neural TRF LMs on a 40x larger
training set with only 1/3 training time and further reduces the WER with
relative reduction of 4.7% on top of a strong LSTM LM baseline.Comment: 5 pages and 2 figure
Multi-space Variational Encoder-Decoders for Semi-supervised Labeled Sequence Transduction
Labeled sequence transduction is a task of transforming one sequence into
another sequence that satisfies desiderata specified by a set of labels. In
this paper we propose multi-space variational encoder-decoders, a new model for
labeled sequence transduction with semi-supervised learning. The generative
model can use neural networks to handle both discrete and continuous latent
variables to exploit various features of data. Experiments show that our model
provides not only a powerful supervised framework but also can effectively take
advantage of the unlabeled data. On the SIGMORPHON morphological inflection
benchmark, our model outperforms single-model state-of-art results by a large
margin for the majority of languages.Comment: Accepted by ACL 201
Exact Hard Monotonic Attention for Character-Level Transduction
Many common character-level, string-to string transduction tasks, e.g.,
grapheme-tophoneme conversion and morphological inflection, consist almost
exclusively of monotonic transductions. However, neural sequence-to sequence
models that use non-monotonic soft attention often outperform popular monotonic
models. In this work, we ask the following question: Is monotonicity really a
helpful inductive bias for these tasks? We develop a hard attention
sequence-to-sequence model that enforces strict monotonicity and learns a
latent alignment jointly while learning to transduce. With the help of dynamic
programming, we are able to compute the exact marginalization over all
monotonic alignments. Our models achieve state-of-the-art performance on
morphological inflection. Furthermore, we find strong performance on two other
character-level transduction tasks. Code is available at
https://github.com/shijie-wu/neural-transducer.Comment: ACL 201
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