31,402 research outputs found
Translating Phrases in Neural Machine Translation
Phrases play an important role in natural language understanding and machine
translation (Sag et al., 2002; Villavicencio et al., 2005). However, it is
difficult to integrate them into current neural machine translation (NMT) which
reads and generates sentences word by word. In this work, we propose a method
to translate phrases in NMT by integrating a phrase memory storing target
phrases from a phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) system into
the encoder-decoder architecture of NMT. At each decoding step, the phrase
memory is first re-written by the SMT model, which dynamically generates
relevant target phrases with contextual information provided by the NMT model.
Then the proposed model reads the phrase memory to make probability estimations
for all phrases in the phrase memory. If phrase generation is carried on, the
NMT decoder selects an appropriate phrase from the memory to perform phrase
translation and updates its decoding state by consuming the words in the
selected phrase. Otherwise, the NMT decoder generates a word from the
vocabulary as the general NMT decoder does. Experiment results on the Chinese
to English translation show that the proposed model achieves significant
improvements over the baseline on various test sets.Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 201
Accuracy-based scoring for phrase-based statistical machine translation
Although the scoring features of state-of-the-art Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PB-SMT) models are weighted so as to optimise an objective function measuring
translation quality, the estimation of the features
themselves does not have any relation to such quality metrics. In this paper, we introduce a translation quality-based feature to PBSMT in a bid to improve the translation quality of the system. Our feature is estimated by averaging
the edit-distance between phrase pairs involved in the translation of oracle sentences, chosen by automatic evaluation metrics from the N-best outputs of a baseline system, and phrase pairs occurring in the N-best list. Using
our method, we report a statistically significant 2.11% relative improvement in BLEU score for the WMT 2009 Spanish-to-English translation task. We also report that using our
method we can achieve statistically significant improvements over the baseline using many other MT evaluation metrics, and a substantial increase in speed and reduction in memory use (due to a reduction in phrase-table size of 87%) while maintaining significant gains in
translation quality
English-Hindi transliteration using context-informed PB-SMT: the DCU system for NEWS 2009
This paper presents English—Hindi transliteration in the NEWS 2009 Machine Transliteration Shared Task adding source context modeling into state-of-the-art log-linear phrase-based statistical machine translation (PB-SMT). Source context features enable us to exploit source similarity in addition to target similarity, as modelled by the language model. We use a memory-based classification
framework that enables efficient estimation of these features while avoiding data sparseness problems.We carried out experiments both at character and transliteration unit (TU) level. Position-dependent source context features produce significant improvements in terms of all evaluation metrics
Parallel Treebanks in Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation
Given much recent discussion and the shift in focus of the field, it is becoming apparent that the incorporation of syntax is the way forward for the current state-of-the-art in machine translation (MT). Parallel treebanks are a relatively recent innovation and appear to be ideal candidates for MT training material. However, until recently there has been no other means to build them than by
hand. In this paper, we describe how we make use of new tools to automatically build a large parallel treebank and extract a set of linguistically motivated phrase pairs from it. We show that adding these phrase pairs to the translation model of a baseline phrase-based statistical MT (PBSMT) system leads to significant improvements in translation quality. We describe further experiments on incorporating parallel treebank information into PBSMT, such as word alignments. We investigate the conditions under which the incorporation of parallel treebank data performs optimally. Finally, we discuss the potential of parallel treebanks in other paradigms of MT
N-gram-based statistical machine translation versus syntax augmented machine translation: comparison and system combination
In this paper we compare and contrast
two approaches to Machine Translation
(MT): the CMU-UKA Syntax Augmented
Machine Translation system (SAMT) and
UPC-TALP N-gram-based Statistical Machine
Translation (SMT). SAMT is a hierarchical
syntax-driven translation system
underlain by a phrase-based model and a
target part parse tree. In N-gram-based
SMT, the translation process is based on
bilingual units related to word-to-word
alignment and statistical modeling of the
bilingual context following a maximumentropy
framework. We provide a stepby-
step comparison of the systems and report
results in terms of automatic evaluation
metrics and required computational
resources for a smaller Arabic-to-English
translation task (1.5M tokens in the training
corpus). Human error analysis clarifies
advantages and disadvantages of the
systems under consideration. Finally, we
combine the output of both systems to
yield significant improvements in translation
quality.Postprint (published version
Using supertags as source language context in SMT
Recent research has shown that Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PB-SMT) systems can benefit from two
enhancements: (i) using words and POS tags as context-informed features on the source side; and (ii) incorporating lexical syntactic descriptions in the form of supertags on the target side. In this work we
present a novel PB-SMT model that combines these two aspects by using supertags as source language contextinformed features. These features enable us to exploit source similarity in addition to target similarity, as modelled by the language model. In our experiments two
kinds of supertags are employed: those from Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar and Combinatory Categorial Grammar.
We use a memory-based classification framework that enables the estimation of these features while avoiding
problems of sparseness. Despite the differences between these two approaches, the supertaggers give similar improvements. We evaluate the performance of our approach on an English-to-Chinese translation task using a state-of-the-art phrase-based SMT system, and report an
improvement of 7.88% BLEU score in translation quality when adding supertags as context-informed features
Improving Statistical Machine Translation Through N-best List
Statistical machine translation (SMT) is a method of translating from one natural language (NL) to another using statistical models generated from examples of the NLs. The quality of translation generated by SMT systems is competitive with other premiere machine translation (MT) systems and more improvements can be made. This thesis focuses on improving the quality of translation by re-ranking the n-best lists that are generated by modern phrase-based SMT systems. The n-best lists represent the n most likely translations of a sentence. The research establishes upper and lower limits of the translation quality achievable through re-ranking. Three methods of generating an n-gram language model (LM) from the n-best lists are proposed. Applying the LMs to re-ranking the n-best lists results in improvements of up to six percent in the Bi-Lingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score of the translation
HMM word-to-phrase alignment with dependency constraints
In this paper, we extend the HMMwordto-phrase alignment model with syntactic dependency constraints. The syntactic
dependencies between multiple words in one language are introduced into the model in a bid to produce coherent
alignments. Our experimental results on a variety of Chinese–English data show that our syntactically constrained
model can lead to as much as a 3.24% relative improvement in BLEU score over current HMM word-to-phrase alignment models on a Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation system when the training data is small, and a comparable performance compared to IBM model 4 on a Hiero-style system
with larger training data. An intrinsic alignment quality evaluation shows that our alignment model with dependency
constraints leads to improvements in both precision (by 1.74% relative) and recall (by 1.75% relative) over the model without dependency information
- …