10,141 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
Multi-word expression-sensitive word alignment
This paper presents a new word alignment method which incorporates knowledge about Bilingual Multi-Word Expressions (BMWEs). Our method of word alignment first extracts such BMWEs in a bidirectional way for a given corpus and then starts conventional word alignment,
considering the properties of BMWEs in their grouping as well as their alignment links. We give partial annotation of alignment links as prior knowledge to the word
alignment process; by replacing the maximum likelihood estimate in the M-step of the IBM Models with the Maximum A
Posteriori (MAP) estimate, prior knowledge about BMWEs is embedded in the prior in this MAP estimate. In our experiments, we saw an improvement of 0.77 Bleu points absolute in JP–EN. Except for one case, our method gave better results than the method using only BMWEs grouping. Even though this paper does not directly address the issues in Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR), it
discusses an approach of direct relevance to the field. This approach could be viewed as the opposite of current trends in CLIR on semantic space that incorporate a notion of order in the bag-of-words model (e.g. co-occurences)
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