16,654 research outputs found
Cross-lingual Word Clusters for Direct Transfer of Linguistic Structure
It has been established that incorporating word cluster features derived from large unlabeled corpora can significantly improve prediction of linguistic structure. While previous work has focused primarily on English, we extend these results to other languages along two dimensions. First, we show that these results hold true for a number of languages across families. Second, and more interestingly, we provide an algorithm for inducing cross-lingual clusters and we show that features derived from these clusters significantly improve the accuracy of cross-lingual structure prediction. Specifically, we show that by augmenting direct-transfer systems with cross-lingual cluster features, the relative error of delexicalized dependency parsers, trained on English treebanks and transferred to foreign languages, can be reduced by up to 13%. When applying the same method to direct transfer of named-entity recognizers, we observe relative improvements of up to 26%
Improving the translation environment for professional translators
When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side.
This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project
Inducing Probabilistic Grammars by Bayesian Model Merging
We describe a framework for inducing probabilistic grammars from corpora of
positive samples. First, samples are {\em incorporated} by adding ad-hoc rules
to a working grammar; subsequently, elements of the model (such as states or
nonterminals) are {\em merged} to achieve generalization and a more compact
representation. The choice of what to merge and when to stop is governed by the
Bayesian posterior probability of the grammar given the data, which formalizes
a trade-off between a close fit to the data and a default preference for
simpler models (`Occam's Razor'). The general scheme is illustrated using three
types of probabilistic grammars: Hidden Markov models, class-based -grams,
and stochastic context-free grammars.Comment: To appear in Grammatical Inference and Applications, Second
International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference; Springer Verlag, 1994. 13
page
Toric grammars: a new statistical approach to natural language modeling
We propose a new statistical model for computational linguistics. Rather than
trying to estimate directly the probability distribution of a random sentence
of the language, we define a Markov chain on finite sets of sentences with many
finite recurrent communicating classes and define our language model as the
invariant probability measures of the chain on each recurrent communicating
class. This Markov chain, that we call a communication model, recombines at
each step randomly the set of sentences forming its current state, using some
grammar rules. When the grammar rules are fixed and known in advance instead of
being estimated on the fly, we can prove supplementary mathematical properties.
In particular, we can prove in this case that all states are recurrent states,
so that the chain defines a partition of its state space into finite recurrent
communicating classes. We show that our approach is a decisive departure from
Markov models at the sentence level and discuss its relationships with Context
Free Grammars. Although the toric grammars we use are closely related to
Context Free Grammars, the way we generate the language from the grammar is
qualitatively different. Our communication model has two purposes. On the one
hand, it is used to define indirectly the probability distribution of a random
sentence of the language. On the other hand it can serve as a (crude) model of
language transmission from one speaker to another speaker through the
communication of a (large) set of sentences
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