958 research outputs found
Bilingual Document Alignment with Latent Semantic Indexing
We apply cross-lingual Latent Semantic Indexing to the Bilingual Document
Alignment Task at WMT16. Reduced-rank singular value decomposition of a
bilingual term-document matrix derived from known English/French page pairs in
the training data allows us to map monolingual documents into a joint semantic
space. Two variants of cosine similarity between the vectors that place each
document into the joint semantic space are combined with a measure of string
similarity between corresponding URLs to produce 1:1 alignments of
English/French web pages in a variety of domains. The system achieves a recall
of ca. 88% if no in-domain data is used for building the latent semantic model,
and 93% if such data is included.
Analysing the system's errors on the training data, we argue that evaluating
aligner performance based on exact URL matches under-estimates their true
performance and propose an alternative that is able to account for duplicates
and near-duplicates in the underlying data.Comment: Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation (2016),
Volume 2: Shared Task Paper
Japanese/English Cross-Language Information Retrieval: Exploration of Query Translation and Transliteration
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are
in different languages, has of late become one of the major topics within the
information retrieval community. This paper proposes a Japanese/English CLIR
system, where we combine a query translation and retrieval modules. We
currently target the retrieval of technical documents, and therefore the
performance of our system is highly dependent on the quality of the translation
of technical terms. However, the technical term translation is still
problematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thus new
terms are progressively created by combining existing base words. In addition,
Japanese often represents loanwords based on its special phonogram.
Consequently, existing dictionaries find it difficult to achieve sufficient
coverage. To counter the first problem, we produce a Japanese/English
dictionary for base words, and translate compound words on a word-by-word
basis. We also use a probabilistic method to resolve translation ambiguity. For
the second problem, we use a transliteration method, which corresponds words
unlisted in the base word dictionary to their phonetic equivalents in the
target language. We evaluate our system using a test collection for CLIR, and
show that both the compound word translation and transliteration methods
improve the system performance
Learning Semantic Representations for the Phrase Translation Model
This paper presents a novel semantic-based phrase translation model. A pair
of source and target phrases are projected into continuous-valued vector
representations in a low-dimensional latent semantic space, where their
translation score is computed by the distance between the pair in this new
space. The projection is performed by a multi-layer neural network whose
weights are learned on parallel training data. The learning is aimed to
directly optimize the quality of end-to-end machine translation results.
Experimental evaluation has been performed on two Europarl translation tasks,
English-French and German-English. The results show that the new semantic-based
phrase translation model significantly improves the performance of a
state-of-the-art phrase-based statistical machine translation sys-tem, leading
to a gain of 0.7-1.0 BLEU points
PRIME: A System for Multi-lingual Patent Retrieval
Given the growing number of patents filed in multiple countries, users are
interested in retrieving patents across languages. We propose a multi-lingual
patent retrieval system, which translates a user query into the target
language, searches a multilingual database for patents relevant to the query,
and improves the browsing efficiency by way of machine translation and
clustering. Our system also extracts new translations from patent families
consisting of comparable patents, to enhance the translation dictionary
Improving the translation environment for professional translators
When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side.
This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project
Cross-lingual Distillation for Text Classification
Cross-lingual text classification(CLTC) is the task of classifying documents
written in different languages into the same taxonomy of categories. This paper
presents a novel approach to CLTC that builds on model distillation, which
adapts and extends a framework originally proposed for model compression. Using
soft probabilistic predictions for the documents in a label-rich language as
the (induced) supervisory labels in a parallel corpus of documents, we train
classifiers successfully for new languages in which labeled training data are
not available. An adversarial feature adaptation technique is also applied
during the model training to reduce distribution mismatch. We conducted
experiments on two benchmark CLTC datasets, treating English as the source
language and German, French, Japan and Chinese as the unlabeled target
languages. The proposed approach had the advantageous or comparable performance
of the other state-of-art methods.Comment: Accepted at ACL 2017; Code available at
https://github.com/xrc10/cross-distil
A Domain Specific Lexicon Acquisition Tool for Cross-Language Information Retrieval
With the recent enormous increase of information dissemination via the web as incentive there is a growing interest in supporting tools for cross-language retrieval. In this paper we describe a disclosure and retrieval approach that fulfils the needs of both information providers and users by offering fast and cheap access to large amounts of documents from various language domains. Relevant information can be retrieved irrespective of the language used for the specification of a query. In order to realize this type of multilingual functionality the availability of several translation tools is needed, both of a generic and a domain specific nature. Domain specific tools are often not available or only against large costs. In this paper we will therefore focus on a way to reduce these costs, namely the automatic derivation of multilingual resources from so-called parallel text corpora. The benefits of this approach will be illustrated for an example system, i.e. the demonstrator developed within the project Twenty-One, which is tuned to information from the area of sustainable development
Embedding Web-based Statistical Translation Models in Cross-Language Information Retrieval
Although more and more language pairs are covered by machine translation
services, there are still many pairs that lack translation resources.
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is an application which needs
translation functionality of a relatively low level of sophistication since
current models for information retrieval (IR) are still based on a
bag-of-words. The Web provides a vast resource for the automatic construction
of parallel corpora which can be used to train statistical translation models
automatically. The resulting translation models can be embedded in several ways
in a retrieval model. In this paper, we will investigate the problem of
automatically mining parallel texts from the Web and different ways of
integrating the translation models within the retrieval process. Our
experiments on standard test collections for CLIR show that the Web-based
translation models can surpass commercial MT systems in CLIR tasks. These
results open the perspective of constructing a fully automatic query
translation device for CLIR at a very low cost.Comment: 37 page
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