Choosing an optimal architecture for segmentation and POS-tagging of Modern Hebrew

A major architectural decision in designing a disambiguation model for segmentation and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging in Semitic languages concerns the choice of the input-output terminal symbols over which the probability distributions are defined. In this paper we develop a segmenter and a tagger for Hebrew based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). We start out from a morphological analyzer and a very small morphologically annotated corpus. We show that a model whose terminal symbols are word segments (=morphemes), is advantageous over a word-level model for the task of POS tagging. However, for segmentation alone, the morpheme-level model has no significant advantage over the word-level model. Error analysis shows that both models are not adequate for resolving a common type of segmentation ambiguity in Hebrew – whether or not a word in a written text is prefixed by a definiteness marker. Hence, we propose a morphemelevel model where the definiteness morpheme is treated as a possible feature of morpheme terminals. This model exhibits the best overall performance, both in POS tagging and in segmentation. Despite the small size of the annotated corpus available for Hebrew, the results achieved using our best model are on par with recen

Amélioration des systèmes de traduction par analyse linguistique et thématique (Application à la traduction depuis l'arabe)

La traduction automatique des documents est considérée comme l une des tâches les plus difficiles en traitement automatique des langues et de la parole. Les particularités linguistiques de certaines langues, comme la langue arabe, rendent la tâche de traduction automatique plus difficile. Notre objectif dans cette thèse est d'améliorer les systèmes de traduction de l'arabe vers le français et vers l'anglais. Nous proposons donc une étude détaillée sur ces systèmes. Les principales recherches portent à la fois sur la construction de corpus parallèles, le prétraitement de l'arabe et sur l'adaptation des modèles de traduction et de langue.Tout d'abord, un corpus comparable journalistique a été exploré pour en extraire automatiquement un corpus parallèle. Ensuite, différentes approches d adaptation du modèle de traduction sont exploitées, soit en utilisant le corpus parallèle extrait automatiquement soit en utilisant un corpus parallèle construit automatiquement.Nous démontrons que l'adaptation des données du système de traduction permet d'améliorer la traduction. Un texte en arabe doit être prétraité avant de le traduire et ceci à cause du caractère agglutinatif de la langue arabe. Nous présentons notre outil de segmentation de l'arabe, SAPA (Segmentor and Part-of-speech tagger for Arabic), indépendant de toute ressource externe et permettant de réduire les temps de calcul. Cet outil permet de prédire simultanément l étiquette morpho-syntaxique ainsi que les proclitiques (conjonctions, prépositions, etc.) pour chaque mot, ensuite de séparer les proclitiques du lemme (ou mot de base). Nous décrivons également dans cette thèse notre outil de détection des entités nommées, NERAr (Named Entity Recognition for Arabic), et nous examions l'impact de l'intégration de la détection des entités nommées dans la tâche de prétraitement et la pré-traduction de ces entités nommées en utilisant des dictionnaires bilingues. Nous présentons par la suite plusieurs méthodes pour l'adaptation thématique des modèles de traduction et de langue expérimentées sur une application réelle contenant un corpus constitué d un ensemble de phrases multicatégoriques.Ces expériences ouvrent des perspectives importantes de recherche comme par exemple la combinaison de plusieurs systèmes lors de la traduction pour l'adaptation thématique. Il serait également intéressant d'effectuer une adaptation temporelle des modèles de traduction et de langue. Finalement, les systèmes de traduction améliorés arabe-français et arabe-anglais sont intégrés dans une plateforme d'analyse multimédia et montrent une amélioration des performances par rapport aux systèmes de traduction de base.Machine Translation is one of the most difficult tasks in natural language and speech processing. The linguistic peculiarities of some languages makes the machine translation task more difficult. In this thesis, we present a detailed study of machine translation systems from arabic to french and to english.Our principle researches carry on building parallel corpora, arabic preprocessing and adapting translation and language models. We propose a method for automatic extraction of parallel news corpora from a comparable corpora. Two approaches for translation model adaptation are explored using whether parallel corpora extracted automatically or parallel corpora constructed automatically. We demonstrate that adapting data used to build machine translation system improves translation.Arabic texts have to be preprocessed before machine translation and this because of the agglutinative character of arabic language. A prepocessing tool for arabic, SAPA (Segmentor and Part-of-speech tagger for Arabic), much faster than the state of the art tools and totally independant of any other external resource was developed. This tool predicts simultaneously morphosyntactic tags and proclitics (conjunctions, prepositions, etc.) for every word, then splits off words into lemma and proclitics.We describe also in this thesis, our named entity recognition tool for arabic, NERAr, and we focus on the impact of integrating named entity recognition in the preprocessing task. We used bilingual dictionaries to propose translations of the detected named entities. We present then many approaches to adapt thematically translation and language models using a corpora consists of a set of multicategoric sentences.These experiments open important research perspectives such as combining many systems when translating. It would be interesting also to focus on a temporal adaptation of translation and language models.Finally, improved machine translation systems from arabic to french and english are integrated in a multimedia platform analysis and shows improvements compared to basic machine translation systems.PARIS11-SCD-Bib. électronique (914719901) / SudocSudocFranceF

Modeling the interface between morphology and syntax in data-driven dependency parsing

When people formulate sentences in a language, they follow a set of rules specific to that language that defines how words must be put together in order to express the intended meaning. These rules are called the grammar of the language. Languages have essentially two ways of encoding grammatical information: word order or word form. English uses primarily word order to encode different meanings, but many other languages change the form of the words themselves to express their grammatical function in the sentence. These languages are commonly subsumed under the term morphologically rich languages. Parsing is the automatic process for predicting the grammatical structure of a sentence. Since grammatical structure guides the way we understand sentences, parsing is a key component in computer programs that try to automatically understand what people say and write. This dissertation is about parsing and specifically about parsing languages with a rich morphology, which encode grammatical information in the form of words. Today’s parsing models for automatic parsing were developed for English and achieve good results on this language. However, when applied to other languages, a significant drop in performance is usually observed. The standard model for parsing is a pipeline model that separates the parsing process into different steps, in particular it separates the morphological analysis, i.e. the analysis of word forms, from the actual parsing step. This dissertation argues that this separation is one of the reasons for the performance drop of standard parsers when applied to other languages than English. An analysis is presented that exposes the connection between the morphological system of a language and the errors of a standard parsing model. In a second series of experiments, we show that knowledge about the syntactic structure of sentence can support the prediction of morphological information. We then argue for an alternative approach that models morphological analysis and syntactic analysis jointly instead of separating them. We support this argumentation with empirical evidence by implementing two parsers that model the relationship between morphology and syntax in two different but complementary ways