Source side pre-ordering using recurrent neural networks for English-Myanmar machine translation

Word reordering has remained one of the challenging problems for machine translation when translating between language pairs with different word orders e.g. English and Myanmar. Without reordering between these languages, a source sentence may be translated directly with similar word order and translation can not be meaningful. Myanmar is a subject-objectverb (SOV) language and an effective reordering is essential for translation. In this paper, we applied a pre-ordering approach using recurrent neural networks to pre-order words of the source Myanmar sentence into target English’s word order. This neural pre-ordering model is automatically derived from parallel word-aligned data with syntactic and lexical features based on dependency parse trees of the source sentences. This can generate arbitrary permutations that may be non-local on the sentence and can be combined into English-Myanmar machine translation. We exploited the model to reorder English sentences into Myanmar-like word order as a preprocessing stage for machine translation, obtaining improvements quality comparable to baseline rule-based pre-ordering approach on asian language treebank (ALT) corpus

The Effect of Normalization for Bi-directional Amharic-English Neural Machine Translation

Machine translation (MT) is one of the main tasks in natural language processing whose objective is to translate texts automatically from one natural language to another. Nowadays, using deep neural networks for MT tasks has received great attention. These networks require lots of data to learn abstract representations of the input and store it in continuous vectors. This paper presents the first relatively large-scale Amharic-English parallel sentence dataset. Using these compiled data, we build bi-directional Amharic-English translation models by fine-tuning the existing Facebook M2M100 pre-trained model achieving a BLEU score of 37.79 in Amharic-English 32.74 in English-Amharic translation. Additionally, we explore the effects of Amharic homophone normalization on the machine translation task. The results show that the normalization of Amharic homophone characters increases the performance of Amharic-English machine translation in both directions

Comparison of Word2vec with Hash2vec for Machine Translation

Machine Translation is the study of computer translation of a text written in one human language into text in a different language. Within this field, a word embedding is a mapping from terms in a language into small dimensional vectors which can be processed using mathematical operations. Two traditional word embedding approaches are word2vec, which uses a Neural Network, and hash2vec, which is based on a simpler hashing algorithm. In this project, we have explored the relative suitability of each approach to sequence to sequence text translation using a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). We also carried out experiments to test if we can directly compute a mapping between word embeddings in one language to word embeddings in another language using Linear Regression followed by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We trained the word2vec model for 24 hours using google collab default settings. This word2vec model when applied to sentence translation produced results with 85% accuracy. Surprisingly, the hash2vec model performed relatively well with 60% accuracy. The hash2vec model required only 6 hours of processing time which saved a lot of time spent in training the word2vec model. Further research can be carried out using the hash2vec technique on larger datasets and applying it to different machine learning models