A Comparison of Different Machine Transliteration Models

Machine transliteration is a method for automatically converting words in one language into phonetically equivalent ones in another language. Machine transliteration plays an important role in natural language applications such as information retrieval and machine translation, especially for handling proper nouns and technical terms. Four machine transliteration models -- grapheme-based transliteration model, phoneme-based transliteration model, hybrid transliteration model, and correspondence-based transliteration model -- have been proposed by several researchers. To date, however, there has been little research on a framework in which multiple transliteration models can operate simultaneously. Furthermore, there has been no comparison of the four models within the same framework and using the same data. We addressed these problems by 1) modeling the four models within the same framework, 2) comparing them under the same conditions, and 3) developing a way to improve machine transliteration through this comparison. Our comparison showed that the hybrid and correspondence-based models were the most effective and that the four models can be used in a complementary manner to improve machine transliteration performance

English-Hindi transliteration using context-informed PB-SMT: the DCU system for NEWS 2009

This paper presents English—Hindi transliteration in the NEWS 2009 Machine Transliteration Shared Task adding source context modeling into state-of-the-art log-linear phrase-based statistical machine translation (PB-SMT). Source context features enable us to exploit source similarity in addition to target similarity, as modelled by the language model. We use a memory-based classification framework that enables efficient estimation of these features while avoiding data sparseness problems.We carried out experiments both at character and transliteration unit (TU) level. Position-dependent source context features produce significant improvements in terms of all evaluation metrics

Integrating source-language context into log-linear models of statistical machine translation

The translation features typically used in state-of-the-art statistical machine translation (SMT) model dependencies between the source and target phrases, but not among the phrases in the source language themselves. A swathe of research has demonstrated that integrating source context modelling directly into log-linear phrase-based SMT (PB-SMT) and hierarchical PB-SMT (HPB-SMT), and can positively influence the weighting and selection of target phrases, and thus improve translation quality. In this thesis we present novel approaches to incorporate source-language contextual modelling into the state-of-the-art SMT models in order to enhance the quality of lexical selection. We investigate the effectiveness of use of a range of contextual features, including lexical features of neighbouring words, part-of-speech tags, supertags, sentence-similarity features, dependency information, and semantic roles. We explored a series of language pairs featuring typologically different languages, and examined the scalability of our research to larger amounts of training data. While our results are mixed across feature selections, language pairs, and learning curves, we observe that including contextual features of the source sentence in general produces improvements. The most significant improvements involve the integration of long-distance contextual features, such as dependency relations in combination with part-of-speech tags in Dutch-to-English subtitle translation, the combination of dependency parse and semantic role information in English-to-Dutch parliamentary debate translation, supertag features in English-to-Chinese translation, or combination of supertag and lexical features in English-to-Dutch subtitle translation. Furthermore, we investigate the applicability of our lexical contextual model in another closely related NLP problem, namely machine transliteration

Anaphora resolution for Arabic machine translation :a case study of nafs

PhD ThesisIn the age of the internet, email, and social media there is an increasing need for processing online information, for example, to support education and business. This has led to the rapid development of natural language processing technologies such as computational linguistics, information retrieval, and data mining. As a branch of computational linguistics, anaphora resolution has attracted much interest. This is reflected in the large number of papers on the topic published in journals such as Computational Linguistics. Mitkov (2002) and Ji et al. (2005) have argued that the overall quality of anaphora resolution systems remains low, despite practical advances in the area, and that major challenges include dealing with real-world knowledge and accurate parsing. This thesis investigates the following research question: can an algorithm be found for the resolution of the anaphor nafs in Arabic text which is accurate to at least 90%, scales linearly with text size, and requires a minimum of knowledge resources? A resolution algorithm intended to satisfy these criteria is proposed. Testing on a corpus of contemporary Arabic shows that it does indeed satisfy the criteria.Egyptian Government

A hybrid approach for transliterated word-level language identification: CRF with post processing heuristics

© {Owner/Author | ACM} {Year}. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in FIRE '14 Proceedings of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2824864.2824876[EN] In this paper, we describe a hybrid approach for word-level language (WLL) identification of Bangla words written in Roman script and mixed with English words as part of our participation in the shared task on transliterated search at Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) in 2014. A CRF based machine learning model and post-processing heuristics are employed for the WLL identification task. In addition to language identification, two transliteration systems were built to transliterate detected Bangla words written in Roman script into native Bangla script. The system demonstrated an overall token level language identification accuracy of 0.905. The token level Bangla and English language identification F-scores are 0.899, 0.920 respectively. The two transliteration systems achieved accuracies of 0.062 and 0.037. The word-level language identification system presented in this paper resulted in the best scores across almost all metrics among all the participating systems for the Bangla-English language pair.We acknowledge the support of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India, through the project “CLIA System Phase II”. The research work of the last author was carried out in the framework of WIQ-EI IRSES (Grant No. 269180) within the FP 7 Marie Curie, DIANA-APPLICATIONS (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) projects and the VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Banerjee, S.; Kuila, A.; Roy, A.; Naskar, SK.; Rosso, P.; Bandyopadhyay, S. (2014). A hybrid approach for transliterated word-level language identification: CRF with post processing heuristics. 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