29,880 research outputs found
Joint morphological-lexical language modeling for processing morphologically rich languages with application to dialectal Arabic
Language modeling for an inflected language
such as Arabic poses new challenges for speech recognition and
machine translation due to its rich morphology. Rich morphology
results in large increases in out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rate and
poor language model parameter estimation in the absence of large
quantities of data. In this study, we present a joint
morphological-lexical language model (JMLLM) that takes
advantage of Arabic morphology. JMLLM combines
morphological segments with the underlying lexical items and
additional available information sources with regards to
morphological segments and lexical items in a single joint model.
Joint representation and modeling of morphological and lexical
items reduces the OOV rate and provides smooth probability
estimates while keeping the predictive power of whole words.
Speech recognition and machine translation experiments in
dialectal-Arabic show improvements over word and morpheme
based trigram language models. We also show that as the
tightness of integration between different information sources
increases, both speech recognition and machine translation
performances improve
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
Neural Machine Translation with Word Predictions
In the encoder-decoder architecture for neural machine translation (NMT), the
hidden states of the recurrent structures in the encoder and decoder carry the
crucial information about the sentence.These vectors are generated by
parameters which are updated by back-propagation of translation errors through
time. We argue that propagating errors through the end-to-end recurrent
structures are not a direct way of control the hidden vectors. In this paper,
we propose to use word predictions as a mechanism for direct supervision. More
specifically, we require these vectors to be able to predict the vocabulary in
target sentence. Our simple mechanism ensures better representations in the
encoder and decoder without using any extra data or annotation. It is also
helpful in reducing the target side vocabulary and improving the decoding
efficiency. Experiments on Chinese-English and German-English machine
translation tasks show BLEU improvements by 4.53 and 1.3, respectivelyComment: Accepted at EMNLP201
MATREX: the DCU MT system for WMT 2010
This paper describes the DCU machine translation system in the evaluation campaign of the Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and Metrics in ACL-2010. We describe the modular design of our multi-engine machine translation (MT) system with particular focus on the components used in this participation.
We participated in the English–Spanish and English–Czech translation tasks, in which we employed our multiengine
architecture to translate. We also participated in the system combination task which was carried out by the MBR
decoder and confusion network decoder
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