24,659 research outputs found
A Survey of Word Reordering in Statistical Machine Translation: Computational Models and Language Phenomena
Word reordering is one of the most difficult aspects of statistical machine
translation (SMT), and an important factor of its quality and efficiency.
Despite the vast amount of research published to date, the interest of the
community in this problem has not decreased, and no single method appears to be
strongly dominant across language pairs. Instead, the choice of the optimal
approach for a new translation task still seems to be mostly driven by
empirical trials. To orientate the reader in this vast and complex research
area, we present a comprehensive survey of word reordering viewed as a
statistical modeling challenge and as a natural language phenomenon. The survey
describes in detail how word reordering is modeled within different
string-based and tree-based SMT frameworks and as a stand-alone task, including
systematic overviews of the literature in advanced reordering modeling. We then
question why some approaches are more successful than others in different
language pairs. We argue that, besides measuring the amount of reordering, it
is important to understand which kinds of reordering occur in a given language
pair. To this end, we conduct a qualitative analysis of word reordering
phenomena in a diverse sample of language pairs, based on a large collection of
linguistic knowledge. Empirical results in the SMT literature are shown to
support the hypothesis that a few linguistic facts can be very useful to
anticipate the reordering characteristics of a language pair and to select the
SMT framework that best suits them.Comment: 44 pages, to appear in Computational Linguistic
Predicting Native Language from Gaze
A fundamental question in language learning concerns the role of a speaker's
first language in second language acquisition. We present a novel methodology
for studying this question: analysis of eye-movement patterns in second
language reading of free-form text. Using this methodology, we demonstrate for
the first time that the native language of English learners can be predicted
from their gaze fixations when reading English. We provide analysis of
classifier uncertainty and learned features, which indicates that differences
in English reading are likely to be rooted in linguistic divergences across
native languages. The presented framework complements production studies and
offers new ground for advancing research on multilingualism.Comment: ACL 201
Weakly Supervised Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognition via Effective Annotation and Representation Projection
The state-of-the-art named entity recognition (NER) systems are supervised
machine learning models that require large amounts of manually annotated data
to achieve high accuracy. However, annotating NER data by human is expensive
and time-consuming, and can be quite difficult for a new language. In this
paper, we present two weakly supervised approaches for cross-lingual NER with
no human annotation in a target language. The first approach is to create
automatically labeled NER data for a target language via annotation projection
on comparable corpora, where we develop a heuristic scheme that effectively
selects good-quality projection-labeled data from noisy data. The second
approach is to project distributed representations of words (word embeddings)
from a target language to a source language, so that the source-language NER
system can be applied to the target language without re-training. We also
design two co-decoding schemes that effectively combine the outputs of the two
projection-based approaches. We evaluate the performance of the proposed
approaches on both in-house and open NER data for several target languages. The
results show that the combined systems outperform three other weakly supervised
approaches on the CoNLL data.Comment: 11 pages, The 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL), 201
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