45,609 research outputs found

    Findings of the 2011 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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    This paper presents the results of the WMT11 shared tasks, which included a translation task, a system combination task, and a task for machine translation evaluation metrics. We conducted a large-scale manual evaluation of 148 machine translation systems and 41 system combination entries. We used the ranking of these systems to measure how strongly automatic metrics correlate with human judgments of translation quality for 21 evaluation metrics. This year featured a Haitian Creole to English task translating SMS messages sent to an emergency response service in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake. We also conducted a pilot 'tunable metrics' task to test whether optimizing a fixed system to different metrics would result in perceptibly different translation quality

    Discriminative ridge regression algorithm for adaptation in statistical machine translation

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    [EN] We present a simple and reliable method for estimating the log-linear weights of a state-of-the-art machine translation system, which takes advantage of the method known as discriminative ridge regression (DRR). Since inappropriate weight estimations lead to a wide variability of translation quality results, reaching a reliable estimate for such weights is critical for machine translation research. For this reason, a variety of methods have been proposed to reach reasonable estimates. In this paper, we present an algorithmic description and empirical results proving that DRR is able to provide comparable translation quality when compared to state-of-the-art estimation methods [i.e. MERT and MIRA], with a reduction in computational cost. Moreover, the empirical results reported are coherent across different corpora and language pairs.The research leading to these results were partially supported by projects CoMUN-HaT-TIN2015-70924-C2-1-R (MINECO/FEDER) and PROMETEO/2018/004. We also acknowledge NVIDIA for the donation of a GPU used in this work.Chinea-Ríos, M.; Sanchis-Trilles, G.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2019). Discriminative ridge regression algorithm for adaptation in statistical machine translation. Pattern Analysis and Applications. 22(4):1293-1305. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-018-0720-5S12931305224Barrachina S, Bender O, Casacuberta F, Civera J, Cubel E, Khadivi S, Lagarda A, Ney H, Tomás J, Vidal E et al (2009) Statistical approaches to computer-assisted translation. Comput Ling 35(1):3–28Bojar O, Buck C, Federmann C, Haddow B, Koehn P, Monz C, Post M, Specia L (eds) (2014) Proceedings of the ninth workshop on statistical machine translation. Association for Computational LinguisticsBrown PF, Pietra VJD, Pietra SAD, Mercer RL (1993) The mathematics of statistical machine translation: parameter estimation. Comput Ling 19:263–311Callison-Burch C, Koehn P, Monz C, Peterson K, Przybocki M, Zaidan OF (2010) Findings of the 2010 joint workshop on statistical machine translation and metrics for machine translation. In: Proceedings of the annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, pp 17–53Chen B, Cherry C (2014) A systematic comparison of smoothing techniques for sentence-level bleu. In: Proceedings of the workshop on statistical machine translation, pp 362–367Cherry C, Foster G (2012) Batch tuning strategies for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics, pp 427–436Clark JH, Dyer C, Lavie A, Smith NA (2011) Better hypothesis testing for statistical machine translation: controlling for optimizer instability. In: Proceedings of the annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, pp 176–181Crammer K, Dekel O, Keshet J, Shalev-Shwartz S, Singer Y (2006) Online passive-aggressive algorithms. J Mach Learn Res 7:551–585Hasler E, Haddow B, Koehn P (2011) Margin infused relaxed algorithm for moses. Prague Bull Math Ling 96:69–78Hopkins M, May J (2011) Tuning as ranking. In: Proceedings of the conference on empirical methods in natural language processing, pp 1352–1362Kneser R, Ney H (1995) Improved backing-off for m-gram language modeling. In: Proceedings of the international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing, pp 181–184Koehn P (2005) Europarl: a parallel corpus for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the machine translation summit, pp 79–86Koehn P (2010) Statistical machine translation. Cambridge University Press, CambridgeKoehn P, Hoang H, Birch A, Callison-Burch C, Federico M, Bertoldi N, Cowan B, Shen W, Moran C, Zens R, Dyer C, Bojar O, Constantin A, Herbst E (2007) Moses: open source toolkit for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, pp 177–180Lavie MDA (2014) Meteor universal: language specific translation evaluation for any target language. In: Proceedings of the annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, pp 376–387Marie B, Max A (2015) Multi-pass decoding with complex feature guidance for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, pp 554–559Martínez-Gómez P, Sanchis-Trilles G, Casacuberta F (2012) Online adaptation strategies for statistical machine translation in post-editing scenarios. Pattern Recogn 45(9):3193–3203Nakov P, Vogel S (2017) Robust tuning datasets for statistical machine translation. arXiv:1710.00346Neubig G, Watanabe T (2016) Optimization for statistical machine translation: a survey. Comput Ling 42(1):1–54Och FJ (2003) Minimum error rate training in statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, pp 160–167Och FJ, Ney H (2003) A systematic comparison of various statistical alignment models. Comput Ling 29:19–51Papineni K, Roukos S, Ward T, Zhu WJ (2002) Bleu: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. In: Proceedings of the international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing, pp 311–318Sanchis-Trilles G, Casacuberta F (2010) Log-linear weight optimisation via Bayesian adaptation in statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, pp 1077–1085Sanchis-Trilles G, Casacuberta F (2015) Improving translation quality stability using Bayesian predictive adaptation. Comput Speech Lang 34(1):1–17Snover M, Dorr B, Schwartz R, Micciulla L, Makhoul J (2006) A study of translation edit rate with targeted human annotation. In: Proceedings of the annual meeting of the association for machine translation in the Americas, pp 223–231Sokolov A, Yvon F (2011) Minimum error rate training semiring. In: Proceedings of the annual conference of the European association for machine translation, pp 241–248Stauffer C, Grimson WEL (2000) Learning patterns of activity using real-time tracking. Pattern Anal Mach Intell 22(8):747–757Stolcke A (2002) Srilm—an extensible language modeling toolkit. In: Proceedings of the international conference on spoken language processing, pp 901–904Tiedemann J (2009) News from opus—a collection of multilingual parallel corpora with tools and interfaces. In: Proceedings of the recent advances in natural language processing, pp 237–248Tiedemann J (2012) Parallel data, tools and interfaces in opus. In: Proceedings of the language resources and evaluation conference, pp 2214–221

    Interactive translation prediction versus conventional post-editing in practice: a study with the CasMaCat workbench

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    [EN] We conducted a field trial in computer-assisted professional translation to compare interactive translation prediction (ITP) against conventional post-editing (PE) of machine translation (MT) output. In contrast to the conventional PE set-up, where an MT system first produces a static translation hypothesis that is then edited by a professional (hence "post-editing"), ITP constantly updates the translation hypothesis in real time in response to user edits. Our study involved nine professional translators and four reviewers working with the web-based CasMaCat workbench. Various new interactive features aiming to assist the post-editor/translator were also tested in this trial. Our results show that even with little training, ITP can be as productive as conventional PE in terms of the total time required to produce the final translation. Moreover, translation editors working with ITP require fewer key strokes to arrive at the final version of their translation.This work was supported by the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement No 287576 (CasMaCat ).Sanchis Trilles, G.; Alabau, V.; Buck, C.; Carl, M.; Casacuberta Nolla, F.; Garcia Martinez, MM.; Germann, U.... (2014). Interactive translation prediction versus conventional post-editing in practice: a study with the CasMaCat workbench. Machine Translation. 28(3-4):217-235. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-014-9157-9S217235283-4Alabau V, Leiva LA, Ortiz-Martínez D, Casacuberta F (2012) User evaluation of interactive machine translation systems. In: Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pp 20–23Alabau V, Buck C, Carl M, Casacuberta F, García-Martínez M, Germann U, González-Rubio J, Hill R, Koehn P, Leiva L, Mesa-Lao B, Ortiz-Martínez D, Saint-Amand H, Sanchis-Trilles G, Tsoukala C (2014) Casmacat: A computer-assisted translation workbench. In: Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp 25–28Alves F, Vale D (2009) Probing the unit of translation in time: aspects of the design and development of a web application for storing, annotating, and querying translation process data. Across Lang Cultures 10(2):251–273Bach N, Huang F, Al-Onaizan Y (2011) Goodness: A method for measuring machine translation confidence. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp 211–219Barrachina S, Bender O, Casacuberta F, Civera J, Cubel E, Khadivi S, Lagarda AL, Ney H, Tomás J, Vidal E, Vilar JM (2009) Statistical approaches to computer-assisted translation. Comput Linguist 35(1):3–28Brown PF, Della Pietra SA, Della Pietra VJ (1993) The mathematics of statistical machine translation: parameter estimation. Comput Linguist 19(2):263–311Callison-Burch C, Koehn P, Monz C, Post M, Soricut R, Specia L (2012) Findings of the 2012 workshop on statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, pp 10–51Carl M (2012a) The CRITT TPR-DB 1.0: A database for empirical human translation process research. In: Proceedings of the AMTA 2012 Workshop on Post-Editing Technology and Practice, pp 1–10Carl M (2012b) Translog-II: a program for recording user activity data for empirical reading and writing research. In: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pp 4108–4112Carl M (2014) Produkt- und Prozesseinheiten in der CRITT Translation Process Research Database. In: Ahrens B (ed) Translationswissenschaftliches Kolloquium III: Beiträge zur Übersetzungs- und Dolmetschwissenschaft (Köln/Germersheim). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, pp 247–266Carl M, Kay M (2011) Gazing and typing activities during translation : a comparative study of translation units of professional and student translators. Meta 56(4):952–975Doherty S, O’Brien S, Carl M (2010) Eye tracking as an MT evaluation technique. Mach Transl 24(1):1–13Elming J, Carl M, Balling LW (2014) Investigating user behaviour in post-editing and translation using the Casmacat workbench. In: O’Brien S, Winther Balling L, Carl M, Simard M, Specia L (eds) Post-editing of machine translation: processes and applications. Cambridge Scholar Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, pp 147–169Federico M, Cattelan A, Trombetti M (2012) Measuring user productivity in machine translation enhanced computer assisted translation. In: Proceedings of the Tenth Biennial Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the AmericasFlournoy R, Duran C (2009) Machine translation and document localization at adobe: From pilot to production. In: Proceedings of MT Summit XIIGreen S, Heer J, Manning CD (2013) The efficacy of human post-editing for language translation. In: Proceedings of SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp 439–448Guerberof A (2009) Productivity and quality in mt post-editing. In: Proceedings of MT Summit XII-Workshop: Beyond Translation Memories: New Tools for Translators MTGuerberof A (2012) Productivity and quality in the post-editing of outputs from translation memories and machine translation. Ph.D. ThesisJust MA, Carpenter PA (1980) A theory of reading: from eye fixations to comprehension. Psychol Rev 87(4):329Koehn P (2009a) A process study of computer-aided translation. Mach Transl 23(4):241–263Koehn P (2009b) A web-based interactive computer aided translation tool. In: Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Software Demonstrations, pp 17–20Krings HP (2001) Repairing texts: empirical investigations of machine translation post-editing processes, vol 5. Kent State University Press, KentLacruz I, Shreve GM, Angelone E (2012) Average pause ratio as an indicator of cognitive effort in post-editing: a case study. In: Proceedings of the AMTA 2012 Workshop on Post-Editing Technology and Practice, pp 21–30Langlais P, Foster G, Lapalme G (2000) Transtype: A computer-aided translation typing system. In: Proceedings of the 2000 NAACL-ANLP Workshop on Embedded Machine Translation Systems, pp 46–51Leiva LA, Alabau V, Vidal E (2013) Error-proof, high-performance, and context-aware gestures for interactive text edition. In: Proceedings of the 2013 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pp 1227–1232Montgomery D (2004) Introduction to statistical quality control. Wiley, HobokenO’Brien S (2009) Eye tracking in translation process research: methodological challenges and solutions, Copenhagen Studies in Language, vol 38. Samfundslitteratur, Copenhagen, pp 251–266Ortiz-Martínez D, Casacuberta F (2014) The new Thot toolkit for fully automatic and interactive statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 14th Annual Meeting of the European Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pp 45–48Plitt M, Masselot F (2010) A productivity test of statistical machine translation post-editing in a typical localisation context. Prague Bulletin Math Linguist 93(1):7–16Sanchis-Trilles G, Ortiz-Martínez D, Civera J, Casacuberta F, Vidal E, Hoang H (2008) Improving interactive machine translation via mouse actions. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp 485–494Simard M, Foster G (2013) Pepr: Post-edit propagation using phrase-based statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of MT Summit XIV, pp 191–198Skadiņš R, Puriņš M, Skadiņa I, Vasiļjevs A (2011) Evaluation of SMT in localization to under-resourced inflected language. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pp 35–4

    Partial least squares for word confidence estimation in machine translation

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    The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38628-2_59We present a new technique to estimate the reliability of the words in automatically generated translations. Our approach addresses confidence estimation as a classification problem where a confidence score is to be predicted from a feature vector that represents each translated word. We describe a new set of prediction features designed to capture context information, and propose a model based on partial least squares to perform the classification. Good empirical results are reported in a large-domain news translation task.Work supported by the European Union Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) under the CasMaCat project (grants agreement no 287576), by Spanish MICINN under TIASA (TIN2009-14205-C04-02) project, and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant ALMPR (Prometeo/2009/014).González Rubio, J.; Navarro Cerdán, JR.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2013). Partial least squares for word confidence estimation in machine translation. En Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis. Springer Verlag (Germany). 500-508. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38628-2_59S500508NIST: National Institute of Standards and Technology MT evaluation official results (November 2006), http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/mt/Ueffing, N., Macherey, K., Ney, H.: Confidence measures for statistical machine translation. In: Proc. of the MT Summit, pp. 394–401. Springer (2003)Sanchis, A., Juan, A., Vidal, E.: Estimation of confidence measures for machine translation. In: Proc. of the Machine Translation Summit, pp. 407–412 (2007)Wold, H.: Estimation of Principal Components and Related Models by Iterative Least squares, pp. 391–420. Academic Press, New York (1966)Berger, A.L., Pietra, V.J.D., Pietra, S.A.D.: A maximum entropy approach to natural language processing. Computational Linguistics 22, 39–71 (1996)Levenshtein, V.: Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions and reversals. Soviet Physics Doklady 10(8), 707–710 (1966)Brown, P., Della Pietra, V., Della Pietra, S., Mercer, R.: The mathematics of statistical machine translation: parameter estimation. Computational Linguistics 19, 263–311 (1993)Mevik, B.H., Wehrens, R., Liland, K.H.: pls: Partial Least Squares and Principal Component regression. R package version 2.3-0 (2011)Callison-Burch, C., Koehn, P., Monz, C., Post, M., Soricut, R., Specia, L.: Findings of the 2012 workshop on statistical machine translation. In: Proc. of the Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, Montréal, Canada, pp. 10–51 (June 2012)Chinchor, N.: The statistical significance of the muc-4 results. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Message Understanding, pp. 30–50 (1992

    Discourse Structure in Machine Translation Evaluation

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    In this article, we explore the potential of using sentence-level discourse structure for machine translation evaluation. We first design discourse-aware similarity measures, which use all-subtree kernels to compare discourse parse trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, we show that a simple linear combination with these measures can help improve various existing machine translation evaluation metrics regarding correlation with human judgments both at the segment- and at the system-level. This suggests that discourse information is complementary to the information used by many of the existing evaluation metrics, and thus it could be taken into account when developing richer evaluation metrics, such as the WMT-14 winning combined metric DiscoTKparty. We also provide a detailed analysis of the relevance of various discourse elements and relations from the RST parse trees for machine translation evaluation. In particular we show that: (i) all aspects of the RST tree are relevant, (ii) nuclearity is more useful than relation type, and (iii) the similarity of the translation RST tree to the reference tree is positively correlated with translation quality.Comment: machine translation, machine translation evaluation, discourse analysis. Computational Linguistics, 201

    Machine translation evaluation resources and methods: a survey

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    We introduce the Machine Translation (MT) evaluation survey that contains both manual and automatic evaluation methods. The traditional human evaluation criteria mainly include the intelligibility, fidelity, fluency, adequacy, comprehension, and informativeness. The advanced human assessments include task-oriented measures, post-editing, segment ranking, and extended criteriea, etc. We classify the automatic evaluation methods into two categories, including lexical similarity scenario and linguistic features application. The lexical similarity methods contain edit distance, precision, recall, F-measure, and word order. The linguistic features can be divided into syntactic features and semantic features respectively. The syntactic features include part of speech tag, phrase types and sentence structures, and the semantic features include named entity, synonyms, textual entailment, paraphrase, semantic roles, and language models. The deep learning models for evaluation are very newly proposed. Subsequently, we also introduce the evaluation methods for MT evaluation including different correlation scores, and the recent quality estimation (QE) tasks for MT. This paper differs from the existing works\cite {GALEprogram2009, EuroMatrixProject2007} from several aspects, by introducing some recent development of MT evaluation measures, the different classifications from manual to automatic evaluation measures, the introduction of recent QE tasks of MT, and the concise construction of the content

    Eye-tracking as a measure of cognitive effort for post-editing of machine translation

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    The three measurements for post-editing effort as proposed by Krings (2001) have been adopted by many researchers in subsequent studies and publications. These measurements comprise temporal effort (the speed or productivity rate of post-editing, often measured in words per second or per minute at the segment level), technical effort (the number of actual edits performed by the post-editor, sometimes approximated using the Translation Edit Rate metric (Snover et al. 2006), again usually at the segment level), and cognitive effort. Cognitive effort has been measured using Think-Aloud Protocols, pause measurement, and, increasingly, eye-tracking. This chapter provides a review of studies of post-editing effort using eye-tracking, noting the influence of publications by Danks et al. (1997), and O’Brien (2006, 2008), before describing a single study in detail. The detailed study examines whether predicted effort indicators affect post-editing effort and results were previously published as Moorkens et al. (2015). Most of the eye-tracking data analysed were unused in the previou

    English → Russian MT evaluation campaign

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    This paper presents the settings and the result of the ROMIP 2013 MT shared task for the English→Russian language direction. The quality of generated translations was assessed using automatic metrics and human evaluation. We also discuss ways to reduce human evaluation efforts using pairwise sentence comparisons by human judges to simulate sort operations
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