Knowledge Expansion of a Statistical Machine Translation System using Morphological Resources

Translation capability of a Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PBSMT) system mostly depends on parallel data and phrases that are not present in the training data are not correctly translated. This paper describes a method that efficiently expands the existing knowledge of a PBSMT system without adding more parallel data but using external morphological resources. A set of new phrase associations is added to translation and reordering models; each of them corresponds to a morphological variation of the source/target/both phrases of an existing association. New associations are generated using a string similarity score based on morphosyntactic information. We tested our approach on En-Fr and Fr-En translations and results showed improvements of the performance in terms of automatic scores (BLEU and Meteor) and reduction of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. We believe that our knowledge expansion framework is generic and could be used to add different types of information to the model.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Distributed Representations for Compositional Semantics

The mathematical representation of semantics is a key issue for Natural Language Processing (NLP). A lot of research has been devoted to finding ways of representing the semantics of individual words in vector spaces. Distributional approaches --- meaning distributed representations that exploit co-occurrence statistics of large corpora --- have proved popular and successful across a number of tasks. However, natural language usually comes in structures beyond the word level, with meaning arising not only from the individual words but also the structure they are contained in at the phrasal or sentential level. Modelling the compositional process by which the meaning of an utterance arises from the meaning of its parts is an equally fundamental task of NLP. This dissertation explores methods for learning distributed semantic representations and models for composing these into representations for larger linguistic units. Our underlying hypothesis is that neural models are a suitable vehicle for learning semantically rich representations and that such representations in turn are suitable vehicles for solving important tasks in natural language processing. The contribution of this thesis is a thorough evaluation of our hypothesis, as part of which we introduce several new approaches to representation learning and compositional semantics, as well as multiple state-of-the-art models which apply distributed semantic representations to various tasks in NLP.Comment: DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, Submitted and accepted in 201

D4.1. Technologies and tools for corpus creation, normalization and annotation

The objectives of the Corpus Acquisition and Annotation (CAA) subsystem are the acquisition and processing of monolingual and bilingual language resources (LRs) required in the PANACEA context. Therefore, the CAA subsystem includes: i) a Corpus Acquisition Component (CAC) for extracting monolingual and bilingual data from the web, ii) a component for cleanup and normalization (CNC) of these data and iii) a text processing component (TPC) which consists of NLP tools including modules for sentence splitting, POS tagging, lemmatization, parsing and named entity recognition

PersoNER: Persian named-entity recognition

© 1963-2018 ACL. Named-Entity Recognition (NER) is still a challenging task for languages with low digital resources. The main difficulties arise from the scarcity of annotated corpora and the consequent problematic training of an effective NER pipeline. To abridge this gap, in this paper we target the Persian language that is spoken by a population of over a hundred million people world-wide. We first present and provide ArmanPerosNERCorpus, the first manually-annotated Persian NER corpus. Then, we introduce PersoNER, an NER pipeline for Persian that leverages a word embedding and a sequential max-margin classifier. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is capable of achieving interesting MUC7 and CoNNL scores while outperforming two alternatives based on a CRF and a recurrent neural network

Translation Alignment and Extraction Within a Lexica-Centered Iterative Workflow

This thesis addresses two closely related problems. The first, translation alignment, consists of identifying bilingual document pairs that are translations of each other within multilingual document collections (document alignment); identifying sentences, titles, etc, that are translations of each other within bilingual document pairs (sentence alignment); and identifying corresponding word and phrase translations within bilingual sentence pairs (phrase alignment). The second is extraction of bilingual pairs of equivalent word and multi-word expressions, which we call translation equivalents (TEs), from sentence- and phrase-aligned parallel corpora. While these same problems have been investigated by other authors, their focus has been on fully unsupervised methods based mostly or exclusively on parallel corpora. Bilingual lexica, which are basically lists of TEs, have not been considered or given enough importance as resources in the treatment of these problems. Human validation of TEs, which consists of manually classifying TEs as correct or incorrect translations, has also not been considered in the context of alignment and extraction. Validation strengthens the importance of infrequent TEs (most of the entries of a validated lexicon) that otherwise would be statistically unimportant. The main goal of this thesis is to revisit the alignment and extraction problems in the context of a lexica-centered iterative workflow that includes human validation. Therefore, the methods proposed in this thesis were designed to take advantage of knowledge accumulated in human-validated bilingual lexica and translation tables obtained by unsupervised methods. Phrase-level alignment is a stepping stone for several applications, including the extraction of new TEs, the creation of statistical machine translation systems, and the creation of bilingual concordances. Therefore, for phrase-level alignment, the higher accuracy of human-validated bilingual lexica is crucial for achieving higher quality results in these downstream applications. There are two main conceptual contributions. The first is the coverage maximization approach to alignment, which makes direct use of the information contained in a lexicon, or in translation tables when this is small or does not exist. The second is the introduction of translation patterns which combine novel and old ideas and enables precise and productive extraction of TEs. As material contributions, the alignment and extraction methods proposed in this thesis have produced source materials for three lines of research, in the context of three PhD theses (two of them already defended), all sharing with me the supervision of my advisor. The topics of these lines of research are statistical machine translation, algorithms and data structures for indexing and querying phrase-aligned parallel corpora, and bilingual lexica classification and generation. Four publications have resulted directly from the work presented in this thesis and twelve from the collaborative lines of research

D-TERMINE : data-driven term extraction methodologies investigated

Automatic term extraction is a task in the field of natural language processing that aims to automatically identify terminology in collections of specialised, domain-specific texts. Terminology is defined as domain-specific vocabulary and consists of both single-word terms (e.g., corpus in the field of linguistics, referring to a large collection of texts) and multi-word terms (e.g., automatic term extraction). Terminology is a crucial part of specialised communication since terms can concisely express very specific and essential information. Therefore, quickly and automatically identifying terms is useful in a wide range of contexts. Automatic term extraction can be used by language professionals to find which terms are used in a domain and how, based on a relevant corpus. It is also useful for other tasks in natural language processing, including machine translation. One of the main difficulties with term extraction, both manual and automatic, is the vague boundary between general language and terminology. When different people identify terms in the same text, it will invariably produce different results. Consequently, creating manually annotated datasets for term extraction is a costly, time- and effort- consuming task. This can hinder research on automatic term extraction, which requires gold standard data for evaluation, preferably even in multiple languages and domains, since terms are language- and domain-dependent. Moreover, supervised machine learning methodologies rely on annotated training data to automatically deduce the characteristics of terms, so this knowledge can be used to detect terms in other corpora as well. Consequently, the first part of this PhD project was dedicated to the construction and validation of a new dataset for automatic term extraction, called ACTER – Annotated Corpora for Term Extraction Research. Terms and Named Entities were manually identified with four different labels in twelve specialised corpora. The dataset contains corpora in three languages and four domains, leading to a total of more than 100k annotations, made over almost 600k tokens. It was made publicly available during a shared task we organised, in which five international teams competed to automatically extract terms from the same test data. This illustrated how ACTER can contribute towards advancing the state-of-the-art. It also revealed that there is still a lot of room for improvement, with moderate scores even for the best teams. Therefore, the second part of this dissertation was devoted to researching how supervised machine learning techniques might contribute. The traditional, hybrid approach to automatic term extraction relies on a combination of linguistic and statistical clues to detect terms. An initial list of unique candidate terms is extracted based on linguistic information (e.g., part-of-speech patterns) and this list is filtered based on statistical metrics that use frequencies to measure whether a candidate term might be relevant. The result is a ranked list of candidate terms. HAMLET – Hybrid, Adaptable Machine Learning Approach to Extract Terminology – was developed based on this traditional approach and applies machine learning to efficiently combine more information than could be used with a rule-based approach. This makes HAMLET less susceptible to typical issues like low recall on rare terms. While domain and language have a large impact on results, robust performance was reached even without domain- specific training data, and HAMLET compared favourably to a state-of-the-art rule-based system. Building on these findings, the third and final part of the project was dedicated to investigating methodologies that are even further removed from the traditional approach. Instead of starting from an initial list of unique candidate terms, potential terms were labelled immediately in the running text, in their original context. Two sequential labelling approaches were developed, evaluated and compared: a feature- based conditional random fields classifier, and a recurrent neural network with word embeddings. The latter outperformed the feature-based approach and was compared to HAMLET as well, obtaining comparable and even better results. In conclusion, this research resulted in an extensive, reusable dataset and three distinct new methodologies for automatic term extraction. The elaborate evaluations went beyond reporting scores and revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches. This identified challenges for future research, since some terms, especially ambiguous ones, remain problematic for all systems. However, overall, results were promising and the approaches were complementary, revealing great potential for new methodologies that combine multiple strategies

Zināšanās bāzētu un korpusā bāzētu metožu kombinētā izmantošanas mašīntulkošanā

ANOTĀCIJA. Mašīntulkošanas (MT) sistēmas tiek būvētas izmantojot dažādas metodes (zināšanās un korpusā bāzētas). Zināšanās bāzēta MT tulko tekstu, izmantojot cilvēka rakstītus likumus. Korpusā bāzēta MT izmanto no tulkojumu piemēriem automātiski izgūtus modeļus. Abām metodēm ir gan priekšrocības, gan trūkumi. Šajā darbā tiek meklēta kombināta metode MT kvalitātes uzlabošanai, kombinējot abas metodes. Darbā tiek pētīta metožu piemērotība latviešu valodai, kas ir maza, morfoloģiski bagāta valoda ar ierobežotiem resursiem. Tiek analizētas esošās metodes un tiek piedāvātas vairākas kombinētās metodes. Metodes ir realizētas un novērtētas, izmantojot gan automātiskas, gan cilvēka novērtēšanas metodes. Faktorēta statistiskā MT ar zināšanās balstītu morfoloģisko analizatoru ir piedāvāta kā perspektīvākā. Darbā aprakstīts arī metodes praktiskais pielietojums. Atslēgas vārdi: mašīntulkošana (MT), zināšanās balstīta MT, korpusā balstīta MT, kombinēta metodeABSTRACT. Machine Translation (MT) systems are built using different methods (knowledge-based and corpus-based). Knowledge-based MT translates text using human created rules. Corpus-based MT uses models which are automatically built from translation examples. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. This work aims to find a combined method to improve the MT quality combining both methods. An applicability of the methods for Latvian (a small, morphologically rich, under-resourced language) is researched. The existing MT methods have been analyzed and several combined methods have been proposed. Methods have been implemented and evaluated using an automatic and human evaluation. The factored statistical MT with a rule-based morphological analyzer is proposed to be the most promising. The practical application of methods is described. Keywords: Machine Translation (MT), Rule-based MT, Statistical MT, Combined approac