Angļu-latviešu statistiskās mašīntulkošanas sistēmas izveide: metodes, resursi un pirmie rezultāti

<p class="Pa4"><strong>DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH-LATVIAN STATISTICAL MACHINE TRANSLATION SYSTEM: METHODS, RESOURCES AND FIRST RESULTS</strong></p><p class="Pa5"><em>Summary</em></p><p>This paper presents research and development of English-Latvian Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) prototypes for legal domain. Several methods have been investigated, i.e., phrase-based models and factored models. Translation quality has been evaluated using automated metrics (BLEU score) and human evaluation. In automatic evaluation the best score (46.44 BLEU points) was assigned to factored model trained on JRC Ac­quis corpus (version 3.0) which was also evaluated as the best from the human viewpoint. In addition, error analysis of SMT output was performed. This analysis showed that al­though the output of the best prototype demonstrated a reasonable quality, it had several frequent common errors, i.e., incorrect form, missing words and wrong word order. For the future, work on tree-based SMT and hybrid systems is proposed.</p

N-gram-based statistical machine translation versus syntax augmented machine translation: comparison and system combination

In this paper we compare and contrast two approaches to Machine Translation (MT): the CMU-UKA Syntax Augmented Machine Translation system (SAMT) and UPC-TALP N-gram-based Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). SAMT is a hierarchical syntax-driven translation system underlain by a phrase-based model and a target part parse tree. In N-gram-based SMT, the translation process is based on bilingual units related to word-to-word alignment and statistical modeling of the bilingual context following a maximumentropy framework. We provide a stepby- step comparison of the systems and report results in terms of automatic evaluation metrics and required computational resources for a smaller Arabic-to-English translation task (1.5M tokens in the training corpus). Human error analysis clarifies advantages and disadvantages of the systems under consideration. Finally, we combine the output of both systems to yield significant improvements in translation quality.Postprint (published version

Near Human-Level Performance in Grammatical Error Correction with Hybrid Machine Translation

We combine two of the most popular approaches to automated Grammatical Error Correction (GEC): GEC based on Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and GEC based on Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The hybrid system achieves new state-of-the-art results on the CoNLL-2014 and JFLEG benchmarks. This GEC system preserves the accuracy of SMT output and, at the same time, generates more fluent sentences as it typical for NMT. Our analysis shows that the created systems are closer to reaching human-level performance than any other GEC system reported so far.Comment: Accepted for oral presentation, research track, short papers, at NAACL 201

Towards improving English-Latvian translation: a system comparison and a new rescoring feature

This paper presents a comparative study of two alternative approaches to statistical machine translation (SMT) and their application to a task of English-to-Latvian translation. Furthermore, a novel feature intending to reflect the relatively free word order scheme of the Latvian language is proposed and successfully applied on the n-best list rescoring step. Moving beyond classical automatic scores of translation quality that are classically presented in MT research papers, we contribute presenting a manual error analysis of MT systems output that helps to shed light on advantages and disadvantages of the SMT systems under consideration.Postprint (published version

English-Latvian SMT: the challenge of translating into a free word order language

This paper presents a comparative study of two approaches to statistical machine translation (SMT) and their application to a task of English-to-Latvian translation, which is still an open research line in the field of automatic translation. We consider a state-of-the-art phrase-based SMT and an alternative N-gram-based SMT systems. The major differences between these two approaches lie in the distinct representations of bilingual units, which are the components of the bilingual model driving translation process and in the statistical modeling of the translation context. Latvian being a rather free word order language implies additional difficulties to the translation process. We contrast different reordering models and investigate how well they deal with the word ordering issue. Moving beyond automatic scores of translation quality that are classically presented in MT research papers, we contribute presenting a manual error analysis of MT systems output that helps to shed light on advantages and disadvantages of the SMT systems under consideration and identify the most prominent source of errors typical for both SMT systems.Postprint (published version

Human-machine Translation Model Evaluation Based on Artificial Intelligence Translation

As artificial intelligence (AI) translation technology advances, big data, cloud computing, and emerging technologies have enhanced the progress of the data industry over the past several decades. Human-machine translation becomes a new interactive mode between humans and machines and plays an essential role in transmitting information. Nevertheless, several translation models have their drawbacks and limitations, such as error rates and inaccuracy, and they are not able to adapt to the various demands of different groups. Taking the AI-based translation model as the research object, this study conducted an analysis of attention mechanisms and relevant technical means, examined the setbacks of conventional translation models, and proposed an AI-based translation model that produced a clear and high quality translation and presented a reference to further perfect AI-based translation models. The values of the manual and automated evaluation have demonstrated that the human-machine translation model improved the mismatchings between texts and contexts and enhanced the accurate and efficient intelligent recognition and expressions. It is set to a score of 1-10 for evaluation comparison with 30 language users as participants, and the achieved 6 points or above is considered effective. The research results suggested that the language fluency score rose from 4.9667 for conventional Statistical Machine Translation to 6.6333 for the AI-based translation model. As a result, the human-machine translation model improved the efficiency, speed, precision, and accuracy of language input to a certain degree, strengthened the correlation between semantic characteristics and intelligent recognition, and pushed the advancement of intelligent recognition. It can provide accurate and high-quality translation for language users and achieve an understanding of natural language input and output and automatic processing

A rule-based translation from written Spanish to Spanish Sign Language glosses

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Computer Speech and Language. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Computer Speech and Language, 28, 3 (2015) DOI: 10.1016/j.csl.2013.10.003One of the aims of Assistive Technologies is to help people with disabilities to communicate with others and to provide means of access to information. As an aid to Deaf people, we present in this work a production-quality rule-based machine system for translating from Spanish to Spanish Sign Language (LSE) glosses, which is a necessary precursor to building a full machine translation system that eventually produces animation output. The system implements a transfer-based architecture from the syntactic functions of dependency analyses. A sketch of LSE is also presented. Several topics regarding translation to sign languages are addressed: the lexical gap, the bootstrapping of a bilingual lexicon, the generation of word order for topic-oriented languages, and the treatment of classifier predicates and classifier names. The system has been evaluated with an open-domain testbed, reporting a 0.30 BLEU (BiLingual Evaluation Understudy) and 42% TER (Translation Error Rate). These results show consistent improvements over a statistical machine translation baseline, and some improvements over the same system preserving the word order in the source sentence. Finally, the linguistic analysis of errors has identified some differences due to a certain degree of structural variation in LSE

Dimensionality reduction methods for machine translation quality estimation

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Identifying the machine translation error types with the greatest impact on post-editing effort

Translation Environment Tools make translators' work easier by providing them with term lists, translation memories and machine translation output. Ideally, such tools automatically predict whether it is more effortful to post-edit than to translate from scratch, and determine whether or not to provide translators with machine translation output. Current machine translation quality estimation systems heavily rely on automatic metrics, even though they do not accurately capture actual post-editing effort. In addition, these systems do not take translator experience into account, even though novices' translation processes are different from those of professional translators. In this paper, we report on the impact of machine translation errors on various types of post-editing effort indicators, for professional translators as well as student translators. We compare the impact of MT quality on a product effort indicator (HTER) with that on various process effort indicators. The translation and post-editing process of student translators and professional translators was logged with a combination of keystroke logging and eye-tracking, and the MT output was analyzed with a fine-grained translation quality assessment approach. We find that most post-editing effort indicators (product as well as process) are influenced by machine translation quality, but that different error types affect different post-editing effort indicators, confirming that a more fine-grained MT quality analysis is needed to correctly estimate actual post-editing effort. Coherence, meaning shifts, and structural issues are shown to be good indicators of post-editing effort. The additional impact of experience on these interactions between MT quality and post-editing effort is smaller than expected