Hybrid language processing in the Spoken Language Translator

The paper presents an overview of the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) system's hybrid language-processing architecture, focussing on the way in which rule-based and statistical methods are combined to achieve robust and efficient performance within a linguistically motivated framework. In general, we argue that rules are desirable in order to encode domain-independent linguistic constraints and achieve high-quality grammatical output, while corpus-derived statistics are needed if systems are to be efficient and robust; further, that hybrid architectures are superior from the point of view of portability to architectures which only make use of one type of information. We address the topics of ``multi-engine'' strategies for robust translation; robust bottom-up parsing using pruning and grammar specialization; rational development of linguistic rule-sets using balanced domain corpora; and efficient supervised training by interactive disambiguation. All work described is fully implemented in the current version of the SLT-2 system.Comment: 4 pages, uses icassp97.sty; to appear in ICASSP-97; see http://www.cam.sri.com for related materia

The Speech-Language Interface in the Spoken Language Translator

The Spoken Language Translator is a prototype for practically useful systems capable of translating continuous spoken language within restricted domains. The prototype system translates air travel (ATIS) queries from spoken English to spoken Swedish and to French. It is constructed, with as few modifications as possible, from existing pieces of speech and language processing software. The speech recognizer and language understander are connected by a fairly conventional pipelined N-best interface. This paper focuses on the ways in which the language processor makes intelligent use of the sentence hypotheses delivered by the recognizer. These ways include (1) producing modified hypotheses to reflect the possible presence of repairs in the uttered word sequence; (2) fast parsing with a version of the grammar automatically specialized to the more frequent constructions in the training corpus; and (3) allowing syntactic and semantic factors to interact with acoustic ones in the choice of a meaning structure for translation, so that the acoustically preferred hypothesis is not always selected even if it is within linguistic coverage.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX. Published: Proceedings of TWLT-8, December 199

Global Thresholding and Multiple Pass Parsing

We present a variation on classic beam thresholding techniques that is up to an order of magnitude faster than the traditional method, at the same performance level. We also present a new thresholding technique, global thresholding, which, combined with the new beam thresholding, gives an additional factor of two improvement, and a novel technique, multiple pass parsing, that can be combined with the others to yield yet another 50% improvement. We use a new search algorithm to simultaneously optimize the thresholding parameters of the various algorithms.Comment: Fixed latex errors; fixed minor errors in published versio

Learning Efficient Disambiguation

This dissertation analyses the computational properties of current performance-models of natural language parsing, in particular Data Oriented Parsing (DOP), points out some of their major shortcomings and suggests suitable solutions. It provides proofs that various problems of probabilistic disambiguation are NP-Complete under instances of these performance-models, and it argues that none of these models accounts for attractive efficiency properties of human language processing in limited domains, e.g. that frequent inputs are usually processed faster than infrequent ones. The central hypothesis of this dissertation is that these shortcomings can be eliminated by specializing the performance-models to the limited domains. The dissertation addresses "grammar and model specialization" and presents a new framework, the Ambiguity-Reduction Specialization (ARS) framework, that formulates the necessary and sufficient conditions for successful specialization. The framework is instantiated into specialization algorithms and applied to specializing DOP. Novelties of these learning algorithms are 1) they limit the hypotheses-space to include only "safe" models, 2) are expressed as constrained optimization formulae that minimize the entropy of the training tree-bank given the specialized grammar, under the constraint that the size of the specialized model does not exceed a predefined maximum, and 3) they enable integrating the specialized model with the original one in a complementary manner. The dissertation provides experiments with initial implementations and compares the resulting Specialized DOP (SDOP) models to the original DOP models with encouraging results.Comment: 222 page