Graph Propagation for Paraphrasing Out-of-Vocabulary Words in Statistical Machine Translation ∗

Out-of-vocabulary (oov) words or phrases still remain a challenge in statistical machine translation especially when a limited amount of parallel text is available for training or when there is a domain shift from training data to test data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to finding translations for oov words. We induce a lexicon by constructing a graph on source language monolingual text and employ a graph propagation technique in order to find translations for all the source language phrases. Our method differs from previous approaches by adopting a graph propagation approach that takes into account not only one-step (from oov directly to a source language phrase that has a translation) but multi-step paraphrases from oov source language words to other source language phrases and eventually to target language translations. Experimental results show that our graph propagation method significantly improves performance over two strong baselines under intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation metrics.

Société Francophone de Classification (SFC) Actes des 26èmes Rencontres

National audienceLes actes des rencontres de la Société Francophone de Classification (SFC, http://www.sfc-classification.net/) contiennent l'ensemble des contributions,présentés lors des rencontres entre les 3 et 5 septembre 2019 au Centre de Recherche Inria Nancy Grand Est/LORIA Nancy. La classification sous toutes ces formes, mathématiques, informatique (apprentissage, fouille de données et découverte de connaissances ...), et statistiques, est la thématique étudiée lors de ces journées. L'idée est d'illustrer les différentes facettes de la classification qui reflètent les intérêts des chercheurs dans la matière, provenant des mathématiques et de l'informatique

Using Comparable Corpora to Augment Statistical Machine Translation Models in Low Resource Settings

Previously, statistical machine translation (SMT) models have been estimated from parallel corpora, or pairs of translated sentences. In this thesis, we directly incorporate comparable corpora into the estimation of end-to-end SMT models. In contrast to parallel corpora, comparable corpora are pairs of monolingual corpora that have some cross-lingual similarities, for example topic or publication date, but that do not necessarily contain any direct translations. Comparable corpora are more readily available in large quantities than parallel corpora, which require significant human effort to compile. We use comparable corpora to estimate machine translation model parameters and show that doing so improves performance in settings where a limited amount of parallel data is available for training. The major contributions of this thesis are the following: * We release ‘language packs’ for 151 human languages, which include bilingual dictionaries, comparable corpora of Wikipedia document pairs, comparable corpora of time-stamped news text that we harvested from the web, and, for non-roman script languages, dictionaries of name pairs, which are likely to be transliterations. * We present a novel technique for using a small number of example word translations to learn a supervised model for bilingual lexicon induction which takes advantage of a wide variety of signals of translation equivalence that can be estimated over comparable corpora. * We show that using comparable corpora to induce new translations and estimate new phrase table feature functions improves end-to-end statistical machine translation performance for low resource language pairs as well as domains. * We present a novel algorithm for composing multiword phrase translations from multiple unigram translations and then use comparable corpora to prune the large space of hypothesis translations. We show that these induced phrase translations improve machine translation performance beyond that of component unigrams. This thesis focuses on critical low resource machine translation settings, where insufficient parallel corpora exist for training statistical models. We experiment with both low resource language pairs and low resource domains of text. We present results from our novel error analysis methodology, which show that most translation errors in low resource settings are due to unseen source language words and phrases and unseen target language translations. We also find room for fixing errors due to how different translations are weighted, or scored, in the models. We target both error types; we use comparable corpora to induce new word and phrase translations and estimate novel translation feature scores. Our experiments show that augmenting baseline SMT systems with new translations and features estimated over comparable corpora improves translation performance significantly. Additionally, our techniques expand the applicability of statistical machine translation to those language pairs for which zero parallel text is available