6,751 research outputs found
Lattice score based data cleaning for phrase-based statistical machine translation
Statistical machine translation relies heavily
on parallel corpora to train its models
for translation tasks. While more and
more bilingual corpora are readily available,
the quality of the sentence pairs
should be taken into consideration. This
paper presents a novel lattice score-based
data cleaning method to select proper sentence
pairs from the ones extracted from a
bilingual corpus by the sentence alignment
methods. The proposed method is carried
out as follows: firstly, an initial phrasebased
model is trained on the full sentencealigned
corpus; then for each of the sentence
pairs in the corpus, word alignments
are used to create anchor pairs and sourceside
lattices; thirdly, based on the translation
model, target-side phrase networks
are expanded on the lattices and Viterbi
searching is used to find approximated decoding
results; finally, BLEU score thresholds
are used to filter out the low-score
sentence pairs for the data cleaning purpose.
Our experiments on the FBIS corpus
showed improvements of BLEU score
from 23.78 to 24.02 in Chinese-English
Multilingual Unsupervised Sentence Simplification
Progress in Sentence Simplification has been hindered by the lack of
supervised data, particularly in languages other than English. Previous work
has aligned sentences from original and simplified corpora such as English
Wikipedia and Simple English Wikipedia, but this limits corpus size, domain,
and language. In this work, we propose using unsupervised mining techniques to
automatically create training corpora for simplification in multiple languages
from raw Common Crawl web data. When coupled with a controllable generation
mechanism that can flexibly adjust attributes such as length and lexical
complexity, these mined paraphrase corpora can be used to train simplification
systems in any language. We further incorporate multilingual unsupervised
pretraining methods to create even stronger models and show that by training on
mined data rather than supervised corpora, we outperform the previous best
results. We evaluate our approach on English, French, and Spanish
simplification benchmarks and reach state-of-the-art performance with a totally
unsupervised approach. We will release our models and code to mine the data in
any language included in Common Crawl
What's Cookin'? Interpreting Cooking Videos using Text, Speech and Vision
We present a novel method for aligning a sequence of instructions to a video
of someone carrying out a task. In particular, we focus on the cooking domain,
where the instructions correspond to the recipe. Our technique relies on an HMM
to align the recipe steps to the (automatically generated) speech transcript.
We then refine this alignment using a state-of-the-art visual food detector,
based on a deep convolutional neural network. We show that our technique
outperforms simpler techniques based on keyword spotting. It also enables
interesting applications, such as automatically illustrating recipes with
keyframes, and searching within a video for events of interest.Comment: To appear in NAACL 201
Enhanced amplitude modulations contribute to the Lombard intelligibility benefit: Evidence from the Nijmegen Corpus of Lombard Speech
Speakers adjust their voice when talking in noise, which is known as Lombard speech. These acoustic adjustments facilitate speech comprehension in noise relative to plain speech (i.e., speech produced in quiet). However, exactly which characteristics of Lombard speech drive this intelligibility benefit in noise remains unclear. This study assessed the contribution of enhanced amplitude modulations to the Lombard speech intelligibility benefit by demonstrating that (1) native speakers of Dutch in the Nijmegen Corpus of Lombard Speech (NiCLS) produce more pronounced amplitude modulations in noise vs. in quiet; (2) more enhanced amplitude modulations correlate positively with intelligibility in a speech-in-noise perception experiment; (3) transplanting the amplitude modulations from Lombard speech onto plain speech leads to an intelligibility improvement, suggesting that enhanced amplitude modulations in Lombard speech contribute towards intelligibility in noise. Results are discussed in light of recent neurobiological models of speech perception with reference to neural oscillators phase-locking to the amplitude modulations in speech, guiding the processing of speech
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