29,188 research outputs found
Towards using web-crawled data for domain adaptation in statistical machine translation
This paper reports on the ongoing work focused on domain adaptation of statistical machine translation using domain-speciïŹc data obtained by domain-focused web crawling. We present a strategy for crawling monolingual and parallel data and their exploitation for testing, language modelling, and system tuning in a phrase--based machine translation framework. The proposed approach is evaluated on the domains of Natural Environment and Labour Legislation and two language
pairs: EnglishâFrench and EnglishâGreek
Capturing lexical variation in MT evaluation using automatically built sense-cluster inventories
The strict character of most of the existing Machine Translation (MT) evaluation metrics does not permit them to capture lexical variation in translation. However, a central
issue in MT evaluation is the high correlation that the metrics should have with human judgments of translation quality. In order to achieve a higher correlation, the identification of sense correspondences between the compared translations becomes really important. Given
that most metrics are looking for exact correspondences, the evaluation results are often misleading concerning translation quality. Apart from that, existing metrics do not permit one to make a conclusive estimation of the impact of Word Sense Disambiguation techniques into
MT systems. In this paper, we show how information acquired by an unsupervised semantic analysis method can be used to render MT evaluation more sensitive to lexical semantics. The sense inventories built by this data-driven method are incorporated into METEOR: they replace WordNet for evaluation in English and render METEORâs synonymy module operable in French. The evaluation results demonstrate that the use of these inventories gives rise to an increase in the number of matches and the correlation with human judgments of translation quality, compared to precision-based metrics
The Parallel Meaning Bank: Towards a Multilingual Corpus of Translations Annotated with Compositional Meaning Representations
The Parallel Meaning Bank is a corpus of translations annotated with shared,
formal meaning representations comprising over 11 million words divided over
four languages (English, German, Italian, and Dutch). Our approach is based on
cross-lingual projection: automatically produced (and manually corrected)
semantic annotations for English sentences are mapped onto their word-aligned
translations, assuming that the translations are meaning-preserving. The
semantic annotation consists of five main steps: (i) segmentation of the text
in sentences and lexical items; (ii) syntactic parsing with Combinatory
Categorial Grammar; (iii) universal semantic tagging; (iv) symbolization; and
(v) compositional semantic analysis based on Discourse Representation Theory.
These steps are performed using statistical models trained in a semi-supervised
manner. The employed annotation models are all language-neutral. Our first
results are promising.Comment: To appear at EACL 201
Description of the Chinese-to-Spanish rule-based machine translation system developed with a hybrid combination of human annotation and statistical techniques
Two of the most popular Machine Translation (MT) paradigms are rule based (RBMT) and corpus based, which include the statistical systems (SMT). When scarce parallel corpus is available, RBMT becomes particularly attractive. This is the case of the Chinese--Spanish language pair.
This article presents the first RBMT system for Chinese to Spanish. We describe a hybrid method for constructing this system taking advantage of available resources such as parallel corpora that are used to extract dictionaries and lexical and structural transfer rules.
The final system is freely available online and open source. Although performance lags behind standard SMT systems for an in-domain test set, the results show that the RBMTâs coverage is competitive and it outperforms the SMT system in an out-of-domain test set. This RBMT system is available to the general public, it can be further enhanced, and it opens up the possibility of creating future hybrid MT systems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Biomedical ontology alignment: An approach based on representation learning
While representation learning techniques have shown great promise in application to a number of different NLP tasks, they have had little impact on the problem of ontology matching. Unlike past work that has focused on feature engineering, we present a novel representation learning approach that is tailored to the ontology matching task. Our approach is based on embedding ontological terms in a high-dimensional Euclidean space. This embedding is derived on the basis of a novel phrase retrofitting strategy through which semantic similarity information becomes inscribed onto fields of pre-trained word vectors. The resulting framework also incorporates a novel outlier detection mechanism based on a denoising autoencoder that is shown to improve performance. An ontology matching system derived using the proposed framework achieved an F-score of 94% on an alignment scenario involving the Adult Mouse Anatomical Dictionary and the Foundational Model of Anatomy ontology (FMA) as targets. This compares favorably with the best performing systems on the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative anatomy challenge. We performed additional experiments on aligning FMA to NCI Thesaurus and to SNOMED CT based on a reference alignment extracted from the UMLS Metathesaurus. Our system obtained overall F-scores of 93.2% and 89.2% for these experiments, thus achieving state-of-the-art results
Evaluating prose style transfer with the Bible
In the prose style transfer task a system, provided with text input and a
target prose style, produces output which preserves the meaning of the input
text but alters the style. These systems require parallel data for evaluation
of results and usually make use of parallel data for training. Currently, there
are few publicly available corpora for this task. In this work, we identify a
high-quality source of aligned, stylistically distinct text in different
versions of the Bible. We provide a standardized split, into training,
development and testing data, of the public domain versions in our corpus. This
corpus is highly parallel since many Bible versions are included. Sentences are
aligned due to the presence of chapter and verse numbers within all versions of
the text. In addition to the corpus, we present the results, as measured by the
BLEU and PINC metrics, of several models trained on our data which can serve as
baselines for future research. While we present these data as a style transfer
corpus, we believe that it is of unmatched quality and may be useful for other
natural language tasks as well
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