Combining data-driven MT systems for improved sign language translation

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of combining two data-driven machine translation (MT) systems for the translation of sign languages (SLs). We take the MT systems of two prominent data-driven research groups, the MaTrEx system developed at DCU and the Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system developed at RWTH Aachen University, and apply their respective approaches to the task of translating Irish Sign Language and German Sign Language into English and German. In a set of experiments supported by automatic evaluation results, we show that there is a definite value to the prospective merging of MaTrEx’s Example-Based MT chunks and distortion limit increase with RWTH’s constraint reordering

Introduction to the special issue on deep learning approaches for machine translation

Deep learning is revolutionizing speech and natural language technologies since it is offering an effective way to train systems and obtaining significant improvements. The main advantage of deep learning is that, by developing the right architecture, the system automatically learns features from data without the need of explicitly designing them. This machine learning perspective is conceptually changing how speech and natural language technologies are addressed. In the case of Machine Translation (MT), deep learning was first introduced in standard statistical systems. By now, end-to-end neural MT systems have reached competitive results. This special issue introductory paper addresses how deep learning has been gradually introduced in MT. This introduction covers all topics contained in the papers included in this special issue, which basically are: integration of deep learning in statistical MT; development of the end-to-end neural MT system; and introduction of deep learning in interactive MT and MT evaluation. Finally, this introduction sketches some research directions that MT is taking guided by deep learning.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Linguistically-driven Multi-task Pre-training for Low-resource Neural Machine Translation

In the present study, we propose novel sequence-to-sequence pre-training objectives for low-resource machine translation (NMT): Japanese-specific sequence to sequence (JASS) for language pairs involving Japanese as the source or target language, and English-specific sequence to sequence (ENSS) for language pairs involving English. JASS focuses on masking and reordering Japanese linguistic units known as bunsetsu, whereas ENSS is proposed based on phrase structure masking and reordering tasks. Experiments on ASPEC Japanese–English & Japanese–Chinese, Wikipedia Japanese–Chinese, News English–Korean corpora demonstrate that JASS and ENSS outperform MASS and other existing language-agnostic pre-training methods by up to +2.9 BLEU points for the Japanese–English tasks, up to +7.0 BLEU points for the Japanese–Chinese tasks and up to +1.3 BLEU points for English–Korean tasks. Empirical analysis, which focuses on the relationship between individual parts in JASS and ENSS, reveals the complementary nature of the subtasks of JASS and ENSS. Adequacy evaluation using LASER, human evaluation, and case studies reveals that our proposed methods significantly outperform pre-training methods without injected linguistic knowledge and they have a larger positive impact on the adequacy as compared to the fluency

Data-driven machine translation for sign languages

This thesis explores the application of data-driven machine translation (MT) to sign languages (SLs). The provision of an SL MT system can facilitate communication between Deaf and hearing people by translating information into the native and preferred language of the individual. We begin with an introduction to SLs, focussing on Irish Sign Language - the native language of the Deaf in Ireland. We describe their linguistics and mechanics including similarities and differences with spoken languages. Given the lack of a formalised written form of these languages, an outline of annotation formats is discussed as well as the issue of data collection. We summarise previous approaches to SL MT, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. Initial experiments in the novel area of example-based MT for SLs are discussed and an overview of the problems that arise when automatically translating these manual-visual languages is given. Following this we detail our data-driven approach, examining the MT system used and modifications made for the treatment of SLs and their annotation. Through sets of automatically evaluated experiments in both language directions, we consider the merits of data-driven MT for SLs and outline the mainstream evaluation metrics used. To complete the translation into SLs, we discuss the addition and manual evaluation of a signing avatar for real SL output

Proceedings of the COLING 2004 Post Conference Workshop on Multilingual Linguistic Ressources MLR2004

International audienceIn an ever expanding information society, most information systems are now facing the "multilingual challenge". Multilingual language resources play an essential role in modern information systems. Such resources need to provide information on many languages in a common framework and should be (re)usable in many applications (for automatic or human use). Many centres have been involved in national and international projects dedicated to building har- monised language resources and creating expertise in the maintenance and further development of standardised linguistic data. These resources include dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, word-nets, and annotated corpora developed along the lines of best practices and recommendations. However, since the late 90's, most efforts in scaling up these resources remain the responsibility of the local authorities, usually, with very low funding (if any) and few opportunities for academic recognition of this work. Hence, it is not surprising that many of the resource holders and developers have become reluctant to give free access to the latest versions of their resources, and their actual status is therefore currently rather unclear. The goal of this workshop is to study problems involved in the development, management and reuse of lexical resources in a multilingual context. Moreover, this workshop provides a forum for reviewing the present state of language resources. The workshop is meant to bring to the international community qualitative and quantitative information about the most recent developments in the area of linguistic resources and their use in applications. The impressive number of submissions (38) to this workshop and in other workshops and conferences dedicated to similar topics proves that dealing with multilingual linguistic ressources has become a very hot problem in the Natural Language Processing community. To cope with the number of submissions, the workshop organising committee decided to accept 16 papers from 10 countries based on the reviewers' recommendations. Six of these papers will be presented in a poster session. The papers constitute a representative selection of current trends in research on Multilingual Language Resources, such as multilingual aligned corpora, bilingual and multilingual lexicons, and multilingual speech resources. The papers also represent a characteristic set of approaches to the development of multilingual language resources, such as automatic extraction of information from corpora, combination and re-use of existing resources, online collaborative development of multilingual lexicons, and use of the Web as a multilingual language resource. The development and management of multilingual language resources is a long-term activity in which collaboration among researchers is essential. We hope that this workshop will gather many researchers involved in such developments and will give them the opportunity to discuss, exchange, compare their approaches and strengthen their collaborations in the field. The organisation of this workshop would have been impossible without the hard work of the program committee who managed to provide accurate reviews on time, on a rather tight schedule. We would also like to thank the Coling 2004 organising committee that made this workshop possible. Finally, we hope that this workshop will yield fruitful results for all participants

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and NMT for Interlingual and Intralingual Communication: Speech to Text Technology for Live Subtitling and Accessibility.

Considered the increasing demand for institutional translation and the multilingualism of international organizations, the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in multilingual communications and for the purposes of accessibility has become an important element in the production of translation and interpreting services (Zetzsche, 2019). In particular, the widespread use of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technology represents a recent development in the attempt of satisfying the increasing demand for interinstitutional, multilingual communications at inter-governmental level (Maslias, 2017). Recently, researchers have been calling for a universalistic view of media and conference accessibility (Greco, 2016). The application of ASR, combined with NMT, may allow for the breaking down of communication barriers at European institutional conferences where multilingualism represents a fundamental pillar (Jopek Bosiacka, 2013). In addition to representing a so-called disruptive technology (Accipio Consulting, 2006), ASR technology may facilitate the communication with non-hearing users (Lewis, 2015). Thanks to ASR, it is possible to guarantee content accessibility for non-hearing audience via subtitles at institutionally-held conferences or speeches. Hence the need for analysing and evaluating ASR output: a quantitative approach is adopted to try to make an evaluation of subtitles, with the objective of assessing its accuracy (Romero-Fresco, 2011). A database of F.A.O.’s and other international institutions’ English-language speeches and conferences on climate change is taken into consideration. The statistical approach is based on WER and NER models (Romero-Fresco, 2016) and on an adapted version. The ASR software solution implemented into the study will be VoxSigma by Vocapia Research and Google Speech Recognition engine. After having defined a taxonomic scheme, Native and Non-Native subtitles are compared to gold standard transcriptions. The intralingual and interlingual output generated by NMT is specifically analysed and evaluated via the NTR model to evaluate accuracy and accessibility

Towards effective cross-lingual search of user-generated internet speech

The very rapid growth in user-generated social spoken content on online platforms is creating new challenges for Spoken Content Retrieval (SCR) technologies. There are many potential choices for how to design a robust SCR framework for UGS content, but the current lack of detailed investigation means that there is a lack of understanding of the specifc challenges, and little or no guidance available to inform these choices. This thesis investigates the challenges of effective SCR for UGS content, and proposes novel SCR methods that are designed to cope with the challenges of UGS content. The work presented in this thesis can be divided into three areas of contribution as follows. The first contribution of this work is critiquing the issues and challenges that in influence the effectiveness of searching UGS content in both mono-lingual and cross-lingual settings. The second contribution is to develop an effective Query Expansion (QE) method for UGS. This research reports that, encountered in UGS content, the variation in the length, quality and structure of the relevant documents can harm the effectiveness of QE techniques across different queries. Seeking to address this issue, this work examines the utilisation of Query Performance Prediction (QPP) techniques for improving QE in UGS, and presents a novel framework specifically designed for predicting of the effectiveness of QE. Thirdly, this work extends the utilisation of QPP in UGS search to improve cross-lingual search for UGS by predicting the translation effectiveness. The thesis proposes novel methods to estimate the quality of translation for cross-lingual UGS search. An empirical evaluation that demonstrates the quality of the proposed method on alternative translation outputs extracted from several Machine Translation (MT) systems developed for this task. The research then shows how this framework can be integrated in cross-lingual UGS search to find relevant translations for improved retrieval performance