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

Getting Past the Language Gap: Innovations in Machine Translation

In this chapter, we will be reviewing state of the art machine translation systems, and will discuss innovative methods for machine translation, highlighting the most promising techniques and applications. Machine translation (MT) has benefited from a revitalization in the last 10 years or so, after a period of relatively slow activity. In 2005 the field received a jumpstart when a powerful complete experimental package for building MT systems from scratch became freely available as a result of the unified efforts of the MOSES international consortium. Around the same time, hierarchical methods had been introduced by Chinese researchers, which allowed the introduction and use of syntactic information in translation modeling. Furthermore, the advances in the related field of computational linguistics, making off-the-shelf taggers and parsers readily available, helped give MT an additional boost. Yet there is still more progress to be made. For example, MT will be enhanced greatly when both syntax and semantics are on board: this still presents a major challenge though many advanced research groups are currently pursuing ways to meet this challenge head-on. The next generation of MT will consist of a collection of hybrid systems. It also augurs well for the mobile environment, as we look forward to more advanced and improved technologies that enable the working of Speech-To-Speech machine translation on hand-held devices, i.e. speech recognition and speech synthesis. We review all of these developments and point out in the final section some of the most promising research avenues for the future of MT

Integrating source-language context into log-linear models of statistical machine translation

The translation features typically used in state-of-the-art statistical machine translation (SMT) model dependencies between the source and target phrases, but not among the phrases in the source language themselves. A swathe of research has demonstrated that integrating source context modelling directly into log-linear phrase-based SMT (PB-SMT) and hierarchical PB-SMT (HPB-SMT), and can positively influence the weighting and selection of target phrases, and thus improve translation quality. In this thesis we present novel approaches to incorporate source-language contextual modelling into the state-of-the-art SMT models in order to enhance the quality of lexical selection. We investigate the effectiveness of use of a range of contextual features, including lexical features of neighbouring words, part-of-speech tags, supertags, sentence-similarity features, dependency information, and semantic roles. We explored a series of language pairs featuring typologically different languages, and examined the scalability of our research to larger amounts of training data. While our results are mixed across feature selections, language pairs, and learning curves, we observe that including contextual features of the source sentence in general produces improvements. The most significant improvements involve the integration of long-distance contextual features, such as dependency relations in combination with part-of-speech tags in Dutch-to-English subtitle translation, the combination of dependency parse and semantic role information in English-to-Dutch parliamentary debate translation, supertag features in English-to-Chinese translation, or combination of supertag and lexical features in English-to-Dutch subtitle translation. Furthermore, we investigate the applicability of our lexical contextual model in another closely related NLP problem, namely machine transliteration

Linguistic Structure in Statistical Machine Translation

This thesis investigates the influence of linguistic structure in statistical machine translation. We develop a word reordering model based on syntactic parse trees and address the issues of pronouns and morphological agreement with a source discriminative word lexicon predicting the translation for individual words using structural features. When used in phrase-based machine translation, the models improve the translation for language pairs with different word order and morphological variation