3,295 research outputs found
Identification of Fertile Translations in Medical Comparable Corpora: a Morpho-Compositional Approach
This paper defines a method for lexicon in the biomedical domain from
comparable corpora. The method is based on compositional translation and
exploits morpheme-level translation equivalences. It can generate translations
for a large variety of morphologically constructed words and can also generate
'fertile' translations. We show that fertile translations increase the overall
quality of the extracted lexicon for English to French translation
Japanese/English Cross-Language Information Retrieval: Exploration of Query Translation and Transliteration
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are
in different languages, has of late become one of the major topics within the
information retrieval community. This paper proposes a Japanese/English CLIR
system, where we combine a query translation and retrieval modules. We
currently target the retrieval of technical documents, and therefore the
performance of our system is highly dependent on the quality of the translation
of technical terms. However, the technical term translation is still
problematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thus new
terms are progressively created by combining existing base words. In addition,
Japanese often represents loanwords based on its special phonogram.
Consequently, existing dictionaries find it difficult to achieve sufficient
coverage. To counter the first problem, we produce a Japanese/English
dictionary for base words, and translate compound words on a word-by-word
basis. We also use a probabilistic method to resolve translation ambiguity. For
the second problem, we use a transliteration method, which corresponds words
unlisted in the base word dictionary to their phonetic equivalents in the
target language. We evaluate our system using a test collection for CLIR, and
show that both the compound word translation and transliteration methods
improve the system performance
Word-to-Word Models of Translational Equivalence
Parallel texts (bitexts) have properties that distinguish them from other
kinds of parallel data. First, most words translate to only one other word.
Second, bitext correspondence is noisy. This article presents methods for
biasing statistical translation models to reflect these properties. Analysis of
the expected behavior of these biases in the presence of sparse data predicts
that they will result in more accurate models. The prediction is confirmed by
evaluation with respect to a gold standard -- translation models that are
biased in this fashion are significantly more accurate than a baseline
knowledge-poor model. This article also shows how a statistical translation
model can take advantage of various kinds of pre-existing knowledge that might
be available about particular language pairs. Even the simplest kinds of
language-specific knowledge, such as the distinction between content words and
function words, is shown to reliably boost translation model performance on
some tasks. Statistical models that are informed by pre-existing knowledge
about the model domain combine the best of both the rationalist and empiricist
traditions
UGENT-LT3 SCATE Submission for WMT16 Shared Task on Quality Estimation
This paper describes the submission of the UGENT-LT3 SCATE system to the WMT16 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE), viz. English-German word and sentence-level QE. Based on the observation that the data set is homogeneous (all sentences belong to the IT domain), we performed bilingual terminology extraction and added features derived from the resulting term list to the well-performing features of the word-level QE task of last year. For sentence-level QE, we analyzed the importance of the features and based on those insights extended the feature set of last year. We also experimented with different learning methods and ensembles. We present our observations from the different experiments we conducted and our submissions for both tasks
Augmenting Translation Lexica by Learning Generalised Translation Patterns
Bilingual Lexicons do improve quality: of parallel corpora alignment, of newly extracted
translation pairs, of Machine Translation, of cross language information retrieval, among
other applications. In this regard, the first problem addressed in this thesis pertains to
the classification of automatically extracted translations from parallel corpora-collections
of sentence pairs that are translations of each other. The second problem is concerned
with machine learning of bilingual morphology with applications in the solution of first
problem and in the generation of Out-Of-Vocabulary translations.
With respect to the problem of translation classification, two separate classifiers for
handling multi-word and word-to-word translations are trained, using previously extracted
and manually classified translation pairs as correct or incorrect. Several insights
are useful for distinguishing the adequate multi-word candidates from those that are
inadequate such as, lack or presence of parallelism, spurious terms at translation ends
such as determiners, co-ordinated conjunctions, properties such as orthographic similarity
between translations, the occurrence and co-occurrence frequency of the translation
pairs. Morphological coverage reflecting stem and suffix agreements are explored as key
features in classifying word-to-word translations. Given that the evaluation of extracted
translation equivalents depends heavily on the human evaluator, incorporation of an
automated filter for appropriate and inappropriate translation pairs prior to human evaluation
contributes to tremendously reduce this work, thereby saving the time involved
and progressively improving alignment and extraction quality. It can also be applied
to filtering of translation tables used for training machine translation engines, and to
detect bad translation choices made by translation engines, thus enabling significative
productivity enhancements in the post-edition process of machine made translations.
An important attribute of the translation lexicon is the coverage it provides. Learning
suffixes and suffixation operations from the lexicon or corpus of a language is an extensively
researched task to tackle out-of-vocabulary terms. However, beyond mere words
or word forms are the translations and their variants, a powerful source of information
for automatic structural analysis, which is explored from the perspective of improving
word-to-word translation coverage and constitutes the second part of this thesis. In this
context, as a phase prior to the suggestion of out-of-vocabulary bilingual lexicon entries,
an approach to automatically induce segmentation and learn bilingual morph-like units by identifying and pairing word stems and suffixes is proposed, using the bilingual
corpus of translations automatically extracted from aligned parallel corpora, manually
validated or automatically classified. Minimally supervised technique is proposed to enable
bilingual morphology learning for language pairs whose bilingual lexicons are highly
defective in what concerns word-to-word translations representing inflection diversity.
Apart from the above mentioned applications in the classification of machine extracted
translations and in the generation of Out-Of-Vocabulary translations, learned bilingual
morph-units may also have a great impact on the establishment of correspondences of
sub-word constituents in the cases of word-to-multi-word and multi-word-to-multi-word
translations and in compression, full text indexing and retrieval applications
Towards using web-crawled data for domain adaptation in statistical machine translation
This paper reports on the ongoing work focused on domain adaptation of statistical machine translation using domain-specific data obtained by domain-focused web crawling. We present a strategy for crawling monolingual and parallel data and their exploitation for testing, language modelling, and system tuning in a phrase--based machine translation framework. The proposed approach is evaluated on the domains of Natural Environment and Labour Legislation and two language
pairs: English–French and English–Greek
Using same-language machine translation to create alternative target sequences for text-to-speech synthesis
Modern speech synthesis systems attempt to produce
speech utterances from an open domain of words. In some situations, the synthesiser will not have the appropriate units to pronounce some words or phrases accurately but it still must attempt to pronounce them. This paper presents a hybrid machine translation and unit selection speech synthesis system. The machine translation system was trained with English as the source and target language. Rather than the synthesiser only saying the input text as would happen in conventional synthesis systems, the synthesiser may say an alternative utterance with the same
meaning. This method allows the synthesiser to overcome the
problem of insufficient units in runtime
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