10,230 research outputs found
A Unified Multilingual Handwriting Recognition System using multigrams sub-lexical units
We address the design of a unified multilingual system for handwriting
recognition. Most of multi- lingual systems rests on specialized models that
are trained on a single language and one of them is selected at test time.
While some recognition systems are based on a unified optical model, dealing
with a unified language model remains a major issue, as traditional language
models are generally trained on corpora composed of large word lexicons per
language. Here, we bring a solution by con- sidering language models based on
sub-lexical units, called multigrams. Dealing with multigrams strongly reduces
the lexicon size and thus decreases the language model complexity. This makes
pos- sible the design of an end-to-end unified multilingual recognition system
where both a single optical model and a single language model are trained on
all the languages. We discuss the impact of the language unification on each
model and show that our system reaches state-of-the-art methods perfor- mance
with a strong reduction of the complexity.Comment: preprin
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
A Nested Attention Neural Hybrid Model for Grammatical Error Correction
Grammatical error correction (GEC) systems strive to correct both global
errors in word order and usage, and local errors in spelling and inflection.
Further developing upon recent work on neural machine translation, we propose a
new hybrid neural model with nested attention layers for GEC. Experiments show
that the new model can effectively correct errors of both types by
incorporating word and character-level information,and that the model
significantly outperforms previous neural models for GEC as measured on the
standard CoNLL-14 benchmark dataset. Further analysis also shows that the
superiority of the proposed model can be largely attributed to the use of the
nested attention mechanism, which has proven particularly effective in
correcting local errors that involve small edits in orthography
Stronger Baselines for Trustable Results in Neural Machine Translation
Interest in neural machine translation has grown rapidly as its effectiveness
has been demonstrated across language and data scenarios. New research
regularly introduces architectural and algorithmic improvements that lead to
significant gains over "vanilla" NMT implementations. However, these new
techniques are rarely evaluated in the context of previously published
techniques, specifically those that are widely used in state-of-theart
production and shared-task systems. As a result, it is often difficult to
determine whether improvements from research will carry over to systems
deployed for real-world use. In this work, we recommend three specific methods
that are relatively easy to implement and result in much stronger experimental
systems. Beyond reporting significantly higher BLEU scores, we conduct an
in-depth analysis of where improvements originate and what inherent weaknesses
of basic NMT models are being addressed. We then compare the relative gains
afforded by several other techniques proposed in the literature when starting
with vanilla systems versus our stronger baselines, showing that experimental
conclusions may change depending on the baseline chosen. This indicates that
choosing a strong baseline is crucial for reporting reliable experimental
results.Comment: To appear at the Workshop on Neural Machine Translation (WNMT
A framework for lexical representation
In this paper we present a unification-based lexical platform designed for
highly inflected languages (like Roman ones). A formalism is proposed for
encoding a lemma-based lexical source, well suited for linguistic
generalizations. From this source, we automatically generate an allomorph
indexed dictionary, adequate for efficient processing. A set of software tools
have been implemented around this formalism: access libraries, morphological
processors, etc.Comment: 9 page
A Machine learning approach to POS tagging
We have applied inductive learning of statistical decision trees
and relaxation labelling to the Natural Language Processing (NLP)
task of morphosyntactic disambiguation (Part Of Speech Tagging).
The learning process is supervised and obtains a language
model oriented to resolve POS ambiguities. This model consists
of a set of statistical decision trees expressing distribution of
tags and words in some relevant contexts.
The acquired language models are complete enough to be directly
used as sets of POS disambiguation rules, and include more complex
contextual information than simple collections of n-grams usually
used in statistical taggers.
We have implemented a quite simple and fast tagger that has been
tested and evaluated on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) corpus with
a remarkable accuracy.
However, better results can be obtained by translating the trees
into rules to feed a flexible relaxation labelling based tagger.
In this direction we describe a tagger which is able to use
information of any kind (n-grams, automatically acquired constraints,
linguistically motivated manually written constraints, etc.), and in
particular to incorporate the machine learned decision trees.
Simultaneously, we address the problem of tagging when only
small training material is available, which is crucial in any process
of constructing, from scratch, an annotated corpus. We show that quite
high accuracy can be achieved with our system in this situation.Postprint (published version
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