4 research outputs found
Investigating the Relationship between Classification Quality and SMT Performance in Discriminative Reordering Models
Reordering is one of the most important factors affecting the quality of the output in
statistical machine translation (SMT). A considerable number of approaches that proposed addressing
the reordering problem are discriminative reordering models (DRM). The core component of the
DRMs is a classifier which tries to predict the correct word order of the sentence. Unfortunately,
the relationship between classification quality and ultimate SMT performance has not been
investigated to date. Understanding this relationship will allow researchers to select the classifier that
results in the best possible MT quality. It might be assumed that there is a monotonic relationship
between classification quality and SMT performance, i.e., any improvement in classification
performance will be monotonically reflected in overall SMT quality. In this paper, we experimentally
show that this assumption does not always hold, i.e., an improvement in classification performance
might actually degrade the quality of an SMT system, from the point of view of MT automatic
evaluation metrics. However, we show that if the improvement in the classification performance is
high enough, we can expect the SMT quality to improve as well. In addition to this, we show that
there is a negative relationship between classification accuracy and SMT performance in imbalanced
parallel corpora. For these types of corpora, we provide evidence that, for the evaluation of the
classifier, macro-averaged metrics such as macro-averaged F-measure are better suited than accuracy,
the metric commonly used to date
A Survey of Word Reordering in Statistical Machine Translation: Computational Models and Language Phenomena
Word reordering is one of the most difficult aspects of statistical machine
translation (SMT), and an important factor of its quality and efficiency.
Despite the vast amount of research published to date, the interest of the
community in this problem has not decreased, and no single method appears to be
strongly dominant across language pairs. Instead, the choice of the optimal
approach for a new translation task still seems to be mostly driven by
empirical trials. To orientate the reader in this vast and complex research
area, we present a comprehensive survey of word reordering viewed as a
statistical modeling challenge and as a natural language phenomenon. The survey
describes in detail how word reordering is modeled within different
string-based and tree-based SMT frameworks and as a stand-alone task, including
systematic overviews of the literature in advanced reordering modeling. We then
question why some approaches are more successful than others in different
language pairs. We argue that, besides measuring the amount of reordering, it
is important to understand which kinds of reordering occur in a given language
pair. To this end, we conduct a qualitative analysis of word reordering
phenomena in a diverse sample of language pairs, based on a large collection of
linguistic knowledge. Empirical results in the SMT literature are shown to
support the hypothesis that a few linguistic facts can be very useful to
anticipate the reordering characteristics of a language pair and to select the
SMT framework that best suits them.Comment: 44 pages, to appear in Computational Linguistic