Knowledge Expansion of a Statistical Machine Translation System using Morphological Resources

Translation capability of a Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PBSMT) system mostly depends on parallel data and phrases that are not present in the training data are not correctly translated. This paper describes a method that efficiently expands the existing knowledge of a PBSMT system without adding more parallel data but using external morphological resources. A set of new phrase associations is added to translation and reordering models; each of them corresponds to a morphological variation of the source/target/both phrases of an existing association. New associations are generated using a string similarity score based on morphosyntactic information. We tested our approach on En-Fr and Fr-En translations and results showed improvements of the performance in terms of automatic scores (BLEU and Meteor) and reduction of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. We believe that our knowledge expansion framework is generic and could be used to add different types of information to the model.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Lects in Helsinki Finnish - a probabilistic component modeling approach

This article examines Finnish lects spoken in Helsinki from the 1970s to the 2010s with a probabilistic model called Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The model searches for underlying components based on the linguistic features used in the interviews. Several coherent lects were discovered as components in the data, which counters the results of previous studies that report only weak co-variation between features that are assumed to present the same lect. The speakers, however, are not categorical in their linguistic behavior and tend to use more than one lect in their speech. This implies that the lects should not be considered in parallel with seemingly uniform linguistic systems such as languages, but as partial systems that constitute a network.Peer reviewe

Recent Trends in Computational Intelligence

Traditional models struggle to cope with complexity, noise, and the existence of a changing environment, while Computational Intelligence (CI) offers solutions to complicated problems as well as reverse problems. The main feature of CI is adaptability, spanning the fields of machine learning and computational neuroscience. CI also comprises biologically-inspired technologies such as the intellect of swarm as part of evolutionary computation and encompassing wider areas such as image processing, data collection, and natural language processing. This book aims to discuss the usage of CI for optimal solving of various applications proving its wide reach and relevance. Bounding of optimization methods and data mining strategies make a strong and reliable prediction tool for handling real-life applications

Ontology verbalization in agglutinating Bantu languages: a study of Runyankore and its generalizability

Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems have been developed to generate text in multiple domains, including personalized patient information. However, their application is limited in Africa because they generate text in English, yet indigenous languages are still predominantly spoken throughout the continent, especially in rural areas. The existing healthcare NLG systems cannot be reused for Bantu languages due to the complex grammatical structure, nor can the generated text be used in machine translation systems for Bantu languages because they are computationally under-resourced. This research aimed to verbalize ontologies in agglutinating Bantu languages. We had four research objectives: (1) noun pluralization and verb conjugation in Runyankore; (2) Runyankore verbalization patterns for the selected description logic constructors; (3) combining the pluralization, conjugation, and verbalization components to form a Runyankore grammar engine; and (4) generalizing the Runyankore and isiZulu approaches to ontology verbalization to other agglutinating Bantu languages. We used an approach that combines morphology with syntax and semantics to develop a noun pluralizer for Runyankore, and used Context-Free Grammars (CFGs) for verb conjugation. We developed verbalization algorithms for eight constructors in a description logic. We then combined these components into a grammar engine developed as a Protégé5X plugin. The investigation into generalizability used the bootstrap approach, and investigated bootstrapping for languages in the same language zone (intra-zone bootstrappability) and languages across language zones (inter-zone bootstrappability). We obtained verbalization patterns for Luganda and isiXhosa, in the same zones as Runyankore and isiZulu respectively, and chiShona, Kikuyu, and Kinyarwanda from different zones, and used the bootstrap metric that we developed to identify the most efficient source—target bootstrap pair. By regrouping Meinhof’s noun class system we were able to eliminate non-determinism during computation, and this led to the development of a generic noun pluralizer. We also showed that CFGs can conjugate verbs in the five additional languages. Finally, we proposed the architecture for an API that could be used to generate text in agglutinating Bantu languages. Our research provides a method for surface realization for an under-resourced and grammatically complex family of languages, Bantu languages. We leave the development of a complete NLG system based on the Runyankore grammar engine and of the API as areas for future work

Conquering Language: Using NLP on a Massive Scale to Build High Dimensional Language Models from the Web

International audienceDictionaries only contain some of the information we need to know about a language. The growth of the Web, the maturation of linguistic process-ing tools, and the decline in price of memory storage allow us to envision de-scriptions of languages that are much larger than before. We can conceive of building a complete language model for a language using all the text that is found on the Web for this language. This article describes our current project to do just that

Machine translation of morphologically rich languages using deep neural networks

This thesis addresses some of the challenges of translating morphologically rich languages (MRLs). Words in MRLs have more complex structures than those in other languages, so that a word can be viewed as a hierarchical structure with several internal subunits. Accordingly, word-based models in which words are treated as atomic units are not suitable for this set of languages. As a commonly used and eff ective solution, morphological decomposition is applied to segment words into atomic and meaning-preserving units, but this raises other types of problems some of which we study here. We mainly use neural networks (NNs) to perform machine translation (MT) in our research and study their diff erent properties. However, our research is not limited to neural models alone as we also consider some of the difficulties of conventional MT methods. First we try to model morphologically complex words (MCWs) and provide better word-level representations. Words are symbolic concepts which are represented numerically in order to be used in NNs. Our first goal is to tackle this problem and find the best representation for MCWs. In the next step we focus on language modeling (LM) and work at the sentence level. We propose new morpheme-segmentation models by which we finetune existing LMs for MRLs. In this part of our research we try to find the most efficient neural language model for MRLs. After providing word- and sentence-level neural information in the first two steps, we try to use such information to enhance the translation quality in the statistical machine translation (SMT) pipeline using several diff erent models. Accordingly, the main goal in this part is to find methods by which deep neural networks (DNNs) can improve SMT. One of the main interests of the thesis is to study neural machine translation (NMT) engines from diff erent perspectives, and finetune them to work with MRLs. In the last step we target this problem and perform end-to-end sequence modeling via NN-based models. NMT engines have recently improved significantly and perform as well as state-of-the-art systems, but still have serious problems with morphologically complex constituents. This shortcoming of NMT is studied in two separate chapters in the thesis, where in one chapter we investigate the impact of diff erent non-linguistic morpheme-segmentation models on the NMT pipeline, and in the other one we benefit from a linguistically motivated morphological analyzer and propose a novel neural architecture particularly for translating from MRLs. Our overall goal for this part of the research is to find the most suitable neural architecture to translate MRLs. We evaluated our models on diff erent MRLs such as Czech, Farsi, German, Russian, and Turkish, and observed significant improvements. The main goal targeted in this research was to incorporate morphological information into MT and define architectures which are able to model the complex nature of MRLs. The results obtained from our experimental studies confirm that we were able to achieve our goal

Machine translation of morphologically rich languages using deep neural networks

This thesis addresses some of the challenges of translating morphologically rich languages (MRLs). Words in MRLs have more complex structures than those in other languages, so that a word can be viewed as a hierarchical structure with several internal subunits. Accordingly, word-based models in which words are treated as atomic units are not suitable for this set of languages. As a commonly used and eff ective solution, morphological decomposition is applied to segment words into atomic and meaning-preserving units, but this raises other types of problems some of which we study here. We mainly use neural networks (NNs) to perform machine translation (MT) in our research and study their diff erent properties. However, our research is not limited to neural models alone as we also consider some of the difficulties of conventional MT methods. First we try to model morphologically complex words (MCWs) and provide better word-level representations. Words are symbolic concepts which are represented numerically in order to be used in NNs. Our first goal is to tackle this problem and find the best representation for MCWs. In the next step we focus on language modeling (LM) and work at the sentence level. We propose new morpheme-segmentation models by which we finetune existing LMs for MRLs. In this part of our research we try to find the most efficient neural language model for MRLs. After providing word- and sentence-level neural information in the first two steps, we try to use such information to enhance the translation quality in the statistical machine translation (SMT) pipeline using several diff erent models. Accordingly, the main goal in this part is to find methods by which deep neural networks (DNNs) can improve SMT. One of the main interests of the thesis is to study neural machine translation (NMT) engines from diff erent perspectives, and finetune them to work with MRLs. In the last step we target this problem and perform end-to-end sequence modeling via NN-based models. NMT engines have recently improved significantly and perform as well as state-of-the-art systems, but still have serious problems with morphologically complex constituents. This shortcoming of NMT is studied in two separate chapters in the thesis, where in one chapter we investigate the impact of diff erent non-linguistic morpheme-segmentation models on the NMT pipeline, and in the other one we benefit from a linguistically motivated morphological analyzer and propose a novel neural architecture particularly for translating from MRLs. Our overall goal for this part of the research is to find the most suitable neural architecture to translate MRLs. We evaluated our models on diff erent MRLs such as Czech, Farsi, German, Russian, and Turkish, and observed significant improvements. The main goal targeted in this research was to incorporate morphological information into MT and define architectures which are able to model the complex nature of MRLs. The results obtained from our experimental studies confirm that we were able to achieve our goal