Improved phrase-based SMT with syntactic reordering patterns learned from lattice scoring

In this paper, we present a novel approach to incorporate source-side syntactic reordering patterns into phrase-based SMT. The main contribution of this work is to use the lattice scoring approach to exploit and utilize reordering information that is favoured by the baseline PBSMT system. By referring to the parse trees of the training corpus, we represent the observed reorderings with source-side syntactic patterns. The extracted patterns are then used to convert the parsed inputs into word lattices, which contain both the original source sentences and their potential reorderings. Weights of the word lattices are estimated from the observations of the syntactic reordering patterns in the training corpus. Finally, the PBSMT system is tuned and tested on the generated word lattices to show the benefits of adding potential sourceside reorderings in the inputs. We confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed method on a medium-sized corpus for Chinese-English machine translation task. Our method outperformed the baseline system by 1.67% relative on a randomly selected testset and 8.56% relative on the NIST 2008 testset in terms of BLEU score

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

Source-side syntactic reordering patterns with functional words for improved phrase-based SMT

Inspired by previous source-side syntactic reordering methods for SMT, this paper focuses on using automatically learned syntactic reordering patterns with functional words which indicate structural reorderings between the source and target language. This approach takes advantage of phrase alignments and source-side parse trees for pattern extraction, and then filters out those patterns without functional words. Word lattices transformed by the generated patterns are fed into PBSMT systems to incorporate potential reorderings from the inputs. Experiments are carried out on a medium-sized corpus for a Chinese–English SMT task. The proposed method outperforms the baseline system by 1.38% relative on a randomly selected testset and 10.45% relative on the NIST 2008 testset in terms of BLEU score. Furthermore, a system with just 61.88% of the patterns filtered by functional words obtains a comparable performance with the unfiltered one on the randomly selected testset, and achieves 1.74% relative improvements on the NIST 2008 testset

The impact of source-side syntactic reordering on hierarchical phrase-based SMT

Syntactic reordering has been demonstrated to be helpful and effective for handling different word orders between source and target languages in SMT. However, in terms of hierarchial PB-SMT (HPB), does the syntactic reordering still has a significant impact on its performance? This paper introduces a reordering approach which explores the { (DE) grammatical structure in Chinese. We employ the Stanford DE classifier to recognise the DE structures in both training and test sentences of Chinese, and then perform word reordering to make the Chinese sentences better match the word order of English. The annotated and reordered training data and test data are applied to a re-implemented HPB system and the impact of the DE construction is examined. The experiments are conducted on the NIST 2008 evaluation data and experimental results show that the BLEU and METEOR scores are significantly improved by 1.83/8.91 and 1.17/2.73 absolute/ relative points respectively

A discriminative latent variable-based "DE" classifier for Chinese–English SMT

Syntactic reordering on the source-side is an effective way of handling word order differences. The (DE) construction is a flexible and ubiquitous syntactic structure in Chinese which is a major source of error in translation quality. In this paper, we propose a new classifier model — discriminative latent variable model (DPLVM) — to classify the DE construction to improve the accuracy of the classification and hence the translation quality. We also propose a new feature which can automatically learn the reordering rules to a certain extent. The experimental results show that the MT systems using the data reordered by our proposed model outperform the baseline systems by 6.42% and 3.08% relative points in terms of the BLEU score on PB-SMT and hierarchical phrase-based MT respectively. In addition, we analyse the impact of DE annotation on word alignment and on the SMT phrase table

Combining data-driven MT systems for improved sign language translation

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of combining two data-driven machine translation (MT) systems for the translation of sign languages (SLs). We take the MT systems of two prominent data-driven research groups, the MaTrEx system developed at DCU and the Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system developed at RWTH Aachen University, and apply their respective approaches to the task of translating Irish Sign Language and German Sign Language into English and German. In a set of experiments supported by automatic evaluation results, we show that there is a definite value to the prospective merging of MaTrEx’s Example-Based MT chunks and distortion limit increase with RWTH’s constraint reordering

Using F-structures in machine translation evaluation

Despite a growing interest in automatic evaluation methods for Machine Translation (MT) quality, most existing automatic metrics are still limited to surface comparison of translation and reference strings. In this paper we show how Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) labelled dependencies obtained from an automatic parse can be used to assess the quality of MT on a deeper linguistic level, giving as a result higher correlations with human judgements