16 research outputs found

    Modeling contextual information in neural machine translation

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    Machine translation has provided impressive translation quality for many language pairs. The improvements over the past few years are largely due to the introduction of neural networks to the field, resulting in the modern sequence-to-sequence neural machine translation models. NMT is at the core of many largescale industrial tools for automatic translation such as Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, Amazon Translate and many others. Current NMT models work on the sentence-level, meaning they are used to translate individual sentences. However, for most practical use-cases, a user is interested in translating a document. In these cases, an MT tool splits a document into individual sentences and translates them independently. As a result, any dependencies between the sentences are ignored. This is likely to result in an incoherent document translation, mainly because of inconsistent translation of ambiguous source words or wrong translation of anaphoric pronouns. For example, it is undesirable to translate “bank” as a “financial bank” in one sentence and then later as a “river bank”. Furthermore, the translation of, e.g., the English third person pronoun “it” into German depends on the grammatical gender of the English antecedent’s German translation. NMT has shown that it has impressive modeling capabilities, but is nevertheless unable to model discourse-level phenomena as it needs access to contextual information. In this work, we study discourse-level phenomena in context-aware NMT. To facilitate the particular studies of interest, we propose several models capable of incorporating contextual information into standard sentence-level NMT models. We direct our focus on several discourse phenomena, namely, coreference (anaphora) resolution, coherence and cohesion. We discuss these phenomena in terms of how well can they be modeled by context-aware NMT, how can we improve upon current state-of-the-art as well as the optimal granularity at which these phenomena should be modeled. We further investigate domain as a factor in context-aware NMT. Finally, we investigate existing challenge sets for anaphora resolution evaluation and provide a robust alternative. We make the following contributions: i) We study the importance of coreference (anaphora) resolution and coherence for context-aware NMT by making use of oracle information specific to these phenomena. ii) We propose a method for improving performance on anaphora resolution based on curriculum learning which is inspired by the way humans organize learning. iii) We investigate the use of contextual information for better handling of domain information, in particular in the case of modeling multiple domains at once and when applied to zero-resource domains. iv) We present several context-aware models to enable us to examine the specific phenomena of interest we already mentioned. v) We study the optimal way of modeling local and global context and present a model theoretically capable of using very large document context. vi) We study the robustness of challenge sets for evaluation of anaphora resolution in MT by means of adversarial attacks and provide a template test set that robustly evaluates specific steps of an idealized coreference resolution pipeline for MT

    The Best Explanation:Beyond Right and Wrong in Question Answering

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    Investigating the Use of Transformer Based Embeddings for Multilingual Discourse Connective Identification

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    In this thesis, we report on our experiments toward multilingual discourse connective (or DC) identification and show how language-specific BERT models seem to be sufficient even with little task-specific training data and do not require any additional handcrafted features to achieve strong results. Although some languages are under-resourced and do not have large annotated discourse connective corpora. To address this, we developed a methodology to induce large synthetic discourse annotated corpora using a parallel word aligned corpus. We evaluated our models in 3 languages: English, Turkish, and Mandarin Chinese; and applied our induction methodology on English-Turkish and English-Chinese. All our models were evaluated in the context of the recent DISRPT 2021 Task 2 shared task. Results show that the F-measure achieved by our simple approach (93.12%, 94.42%, 87.47% for English, Turkish and Chinese) are near or at state-of-the-art for the 3 languages while being simple and not requiring any handcrafted features

    Linguistic Structure in Statistical Machine Translation

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    This thesis investigates the influence of linguistic structure in statistical machine translation. We develop a word reordering model based on syntactic parse trees and address the issues of pronouns and morphological agreement with a source discriminative word lexicon predicting the translation for individual words using structural features. When used in phrase-based machine translation, the models improve the translation for language pairs with different word order and morphological variation

    Metaphor and divine paternity : the concept of God's fatherhood in the Divinae institutiones of Lactantius (250-325 CE)

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    This study is an exercise in historical theology and theolinguistics. The mention of historical theology entails that this investigation will dialogue with Christian authors of the past in order to illuminate modern theological issues. On the other hand, the allusion to theolinguistics (the study of how religious belief, thought and practice relates to language) indicates that this study will endeavor to discern what Christians mean when they employ terms like “Father” in theological discourse or corporate worship (i.e. liturgy). Should “Father” be viewed as a literal assignation for God? To what extent does this divine title signify the ontology or being of God? These questions will be addressed in the course of this study to show what bearing the doctrine of God the Father has on Christian belief and praxis. In particular, we are interested in what Lactantius means when he refers to God as Father. What implications thereby follow from his usage of this expression? I would briefly like to explain why Lactantius has been chosen as a test case for an ancient Latin writer, who thought of God as Father. While it seems that numerous early church writers conceived God as Father in a metaphorical sense, the Lactantian concept of divine paternity seems to hold promise for additional studies in view of his contention that God is Father in a number of senses and primarily in terms of his status as Lord (dominus). Lactantius is accustomed to call God “Father and Lord” (pater et dominus). This vocabulary is used in the context of Roman notions such as paterfamilias, pater patriae and pater or patria potestas. Lactantius also stresses the eschatological character of God’s paternity in the final book of his Divine Institutes (Divinae institutiones). While modern theology has articulated and expanded our knowledge of God’s eschatological fatherhood, this study proposes that the Lactantian concept illuminates elements of God’s future paternity that may be useful to those engaging in historical theology. Finally, I would like to thank the following persons for their varying and diverse contributions to this study: Dr. Philip Blosser gave me the inspiration to pursue the question of divine gender and pointed me towards useful definitions for the term “metaphor” such as “ambiguous identity synthesis” or “cross-modal sorting.” Rotary International (especially in the Lenoir and Hickory area) made my studies in Glasgow possible and they have been a fine support even after my 2001-2002 tenure as a Rotary scholar ended. I also want to express my appreciation to Dr. John Blakey (my erstwhile classics professor), Stacy Feldstein (a colleague in classical studies), Edward and Eleanor Foster (my parents), Sylvia Foster (my wife); David Schuman (for emphasizing the importance of carefully scrutinizing primary texts from antiquity when one undertakes a research project), and Solomon Landers (Hebrew and Aramaic specialist) for helping me understand the significance of certain Hebrew verbal stems

    Extracting proofs from documents

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    Often, theorem checkers like PVS are used to check an existing proof, which is part of some document. Since there is a large difference between the notations used in the documents and the notations used in the theorem checkers, it is usually a laborious task to convert an existing proof into a format which can be checked by a machine. In the system that we propose, the author is assisted in the process of converting an existing proof into the PVS language and having it checked by PVS. 1 Introduction The now-classic ALGOL 60 report [5] recognized three different levels of language: a reference language, a publication language and several hardware representations, whereby the publication language was intended to admit variations on the reference language and was to be used for stating and communicating processes. The importance of publication language ---often referred to nowadays as "pseudo-code"--- is difficult to exaggerate since a publication language is the most effective way..

    Disambiguating explicit discourse connectives without oracles

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    Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

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    Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT
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