48,498 research outputs found
An Investigation on Text-Based Cross-Language Picture Retrieval Effectiveness through the Analysis of User Queries
Purpose: This paper describes a study of the queries generated from a user experiment for cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) from a historic image archive. Italian speaking users generated 618 queries for a set of known-item search tasks. The queries generated by user’s interaction with the system have been analysed and the results used to suggest recommendations for the future development of cross-language retrieval systems for digital image libraries.
Methodology: A controlled lab-based user study was carried out using a prototype Italian-English image retrieval system. Participants were asked to carry out searches for 16 images provided to them, a known-item search task. User’s interactions with the system were recorded and queries were analysed manually quantitatively and qualitatively.
Findings: Results highlight the diversity in requests for similar visual content and the weaknesses of Machine Translation for query translation. Through the manual translation of queries we show the benefits of using high-quality translation resources. The results show the individual characteristics of user’s whilst performing known-item searches and the overlap obtained between query terms and structured image captions, highlighting the use of user’s search terms for objects within the foreground of an image.
Limitations and Implications: This research looks in-depth into one case of interaction and one image repository. Despite this limitation, the discussed results are likely to be valid across other languages and image repository.
Value: The growing quantity of digital visual material in digital libraries offers the potential to apply techniques from CLIR to provide cross-language information access services. However, to develop effective systems requires studying user’s search behaviours, particularly in digital image libraries. The value of this paper is in the provision of empirical evidence to support recommendations for effective cross-language image retrieval system design.</p
Improving the translation environment for professional translators
When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side.
This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project
Observing Users - Designing clarity a case study on the user-centred design of a cross-language information retrieval system
This paper presents a case study of the development of an interface to a novel and complex form of document retrieval: searching for texts written in foreign languages based on native language queries. Although the underlying technology for achieving such a search is relatively well understood, the appropriate interface design is not. A study involving users (with such searching needs) from the start of the design process is described covering initial examination of user needs and tasks; preliminary
design and testing of interface components; building, testing, and further refining an interface; before
finally conducting usability tests of the system. Lessons are learned at every stage of the process leading to a much more informed view of how such an interface should be built
Neural System Combination for Machine Translation
Neural machine translation (NMT) becomes a new approach to machine
translation and generates much more fluent results compared to statistical
machine translation (SMT).
However, SMT is usually better than NMT in translation adequacy. It is
therefore a promising direction to combine the advantages of both NMT and SMT.
In this paper, we propose a neural system combination framework leveraging
multi-source NMT, which takes as input the outputs of NMT and SMT systems and
produces the final translation.
Extensive experiments on the Chinese-to-English translation task show that
our model archives significant improvement by 5.3 BLEU points over the best
single system output and 3.4 BLEU points over the state-of-the-art traditional
system combination methods.Comment: Accepted as a short paper by ACL-201
Modelling source- and target-language syntactic Information as conditional context in interactive neural machine translation
In interactive machine translation (MT),
human translators correct errors in auto-
matic translations in collaboration with the
MT systems, which is seen as an effective
way to improve the productivity gain in
translation. In this study, we model source-
language syntactic constituency parse and
target-language syntactic descriptions in
the form of supertags as conditional con-
text for interactive prediction in neural
MT (NMT). We found that the supertags
significantly improve productivity gain in
translation in interactive-predictive NMT
(INMT), while syntactic parsing somewhat
found to be effective in reducing human
efforts in translation. Furthermore, when
we model this source- and target-language
syntactic information together as the con-
ditional context, both types complement
each other and our fully syntax-informed
INMT model shows statistically significant
reduction in human efforts for a French–
to–English translation task in a reference-
simulated setting, achieving 4.30 points
absolute (corresponding to 9.18% relative)
improvement in terms of word prediction
accuracy (WPA) and 4.84 points absolute
(corresponding to 9.01% relative) reduc-
tion in terms of word stroke ratio (WSR)
over the baseline
Multi-channel Encoder for Neural Machine Translation
Attention-based Encoder-Decoder has the effective architecture for neural
machine translation (NMT), which typically relies on recurrent neural networks
(RNN) to build the blocks that will be lately called by attentive reader during
the decoding process. This design of encoder yields relatively uniform
composition on source sentence, despite the gating mechanism employed in
encoding RNN. On the other hand, we often hope the decoder to take pieces of
source sentence at varying levels suiting its own linguistic structure: for
example, we may want to take the entity name in its raw form while taking an
idiom as a perfectly composed unit. Motivated by this demand, we propose
Multi-channel Encoder (MCE), which enhances encoding components with different
levels of composition. More specifically, in addition to the hidden state of
encoding RNN, MCE takes 1) the original word embedding for raw encoding with no
composition, and 2) a particular design of external memory in Neural Turing
Machine (NTM) for more complex composition, while all three encoding strategies
are properly blended during decoding. Empirical study on Chinese-English
translation shows that our model can improve by 6.52 BLEU points upon a strong
open source NMT system: DL4MT1. On the WMT14 English- French task, our single
shallow system achieves BLEU=38.8, comparable with the state-of-the-art deep
models.Comment: Accepted by AAAI-201
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