Hybrid language processing in the Spoken Language Translator

The paper presents an overview of the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) system's hybrid language-processing architecture, focussing on the way in which rule-based and statistical methods are combined to achieve robust and efficient performance within a linguistically motivated framework. In general, we argue that rules are desirable in order to encode domain-independent linguistic constraints and achieve high-quality grammatical output, while corpus-derived statistics are needed if systems are to be efficient and robust; further, that hybrid architectures are superior from the point of view of portability to architectures which only make use of one type of information. We address the topics of ``multi-engine'' strategies for robust translation; robust bottom-up parsing using pruning and grammar specialization; rational development of linguistic rule-sets using balanced domain corpora; and efficient supervised training by interactive disambiguation. All work described is fully implemented in the current version of the SLT-2 system.Comment: 4 pages, uses icassp97.sty; to appear in ICASSP-97; see http://www.cam.sri.com for related materia

Domain transfer for deep natural language generation from abstract meaning representations

Stochastic natural language generation systems that are trained from labelled datasets are often domainspecific in their annotation and in their mapping from semantic input representations to lexical-syntactic outputs. As a result, learnt models fail to generalize across domains, heavily restricting their usability beyond single applications. In this article, we focus on the problem of domain adaptation for natural language generation. We show how linguistic knowledge from a source domain, for which labelled data is available, can be adapted to a target domain by reusing training data across domains. As a key to this, we propose to employ abstract meaning representations as a common semantic representation across domains. We model natural language generation as a long short-term memory recurrent neural network encoderdecoder, in which one recurrent neural network learns a latent representation of a semantic input, and a second recurrent neural network learns to decode it to a sequence of words. We show that the learnt representations can be transferred across domains and can be leveraged effectively to improve training on new unseen domains. Experiments in three different domains and with six datasets demonstrate that the lexical-syntactic constructions learnt in one domain can be transferred to new domains and achieve up to 75-100% of the performance of in-domain training. This is based on objective metrics such as BLEU and semantic error rate and a subjective human rating study. Training a policy from prior knowledge from a different domain is consistently better than pure in-domain training by up to 10%

Discourse Structure in Machine Translation Evaluation

In this article, we explore the potential of using sentence-level discourse structure for machine translation evaluation. We first design discourse-aware similarity measures, which use all-subtree kernels to compare discourse parse trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, we show that a simple linear combination with these measures can help improve various existing machine translation evaluation metrics regarding correlation with human judgments both at the segment- and at the system-level. This suggests that discourse information is complementary to the information used by many of the existing evaluation metrics, and thus it could be taken into account when developing richer evaluation metrics, such as the WMT-14 winning combined metric DiscoTKparty. We also provide a detailed analysis of the relevance of various discourse elements and relations from the RST parse trees for machine translation evaluation. In particular we show that: (i) all aspects of the RST tree are relevant, (ii) nuclearity is more useful than relation type, and (iii) the similarity of the translation RST tree to the reference tree is positively correlated with translation quality.Comment: machine translation, machine translation evaluation, discourse analysis. Computational Linguistics, 201

Using Confidential Data for Domain Adaptation of Neural Machine Translation

We propose a multilingual method for the extraction of biased sentences from Wikipedia, and use it to create corpora in Bulgarian, French and English. Sifting through the revision history of the articles that at some point had been considered biased and later corrected, we retrieve the last tagged and the first untagged revisions as the before/after snapshots of what was deemed a violation of Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy. We extract the sentences that were removed or rewritten in that edit. The approach yields sufficient data even in the case of relatively small Wikipedias, such as the Bulgarian one, where 62k articles produced 5k biased sentences. We evaluate our method by manually annotating 520 sentences for Bulgarian and French, and 744 for English. We assess the level of noise and analyze its sources. Finally, we exploit the data with well-known classification methods to detect biased sentences. Code and datasets are hosted at https://github.com/crim-ca/wiki-bias

Recent Advances in Transfer Learning for Cross-Dataset Visual Recognition: A Problem-Oriented Perspective

This paper takes a problem-oriented perspective and presents a comprehensive review of transfer learning methods, both shallow and deep, for cross-dataset visual recognition. Specifically, it categorises the cross-dataset recognition into seventeen problems based on a set of carefully chosen data and label attributes. Such a problem-oriented taxonomy has allowed us to examine how different transfer learning approaches tackle each problem and how well each problem has been researched to date. The comprehensive problem-oriented review of the advances in transfer learning with respect to the problem has not only revealed the challenges in transfer learning for visual recognition, but also the problems (e.g. eight of the seventeen problems) that have been scarcely studied. This survey not only presents an up-to-date technical review for researchers, but also a systematic approach and a reference for a machine learning practitioner to categorise a real problem and to look up for a possible solution accordingly