3,830 research outputs found
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
Weakly Supervised Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognition via Effective Annotation and Representation Projection
The state-of-the-art named entity recognition (NER) systems are supervised
machine learning models that require large amounts of manually annotated data
to achieve high accuracy. However, annotating NER data by human is expensive
and time-consuming, and can be quite difficult for a new language. In this
paper, we present two weakly supervised approaches for cross-lingual NER with
no human annotation in a target language. The first approach is to create
automatically labeled NER data for a target language via annotation projection
on comparable corpora, where we develop a heuristic scheme that effectively
selects good-quality projection-labeled data from noisy data. The second
approach is to project distributed representations of words (word embeddings)
from a target language to a source language, so that the source-language NER
system can be applied to the target language without re-training. We also
design two co-decoding schemes that effectively combine the outputs of the two
projection-based approaches. We evaluate the performance of the proposed
approaches on both in-house and open NER data for several target languages. The
results show that the combined systems outperform three other weakly supervised
approaches on the CoNLL data.Comment: 11 pages, The 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL), 201
Identifying Semantic Divergences in Parallel Text without Annotations
Recognizing that even correct translations are not always semantically
equivalent, we automatically detect meaning divergences in parallel sentence
pairs with a deep neural model of bilingual semantic similarity which can be
trained for any parallel corpus without any manual annotation. We show that our
semantic model detects divergences more accurately than models based on surface
features derived from word alignments, and that these divergences matter for
neural machine translation.Comment: Accepted as a full paper to NAACL 201
An Empirical Analysis of NMT-Derived Interlingual Embeddings and their Use in Parallel Sentence Identification
End-to-end neural machine translation has overtaken statistical machine
translation in terms of translation quality for some language pairs, specially
those with large amounts of parallel data. Besides this palpable improvement,
neural networks provide several new properties. A single system can be trained
to translate between many languages at almost no additional cost other than
training time. Furthermore, internal representations learned by the network
serve as a new semantic representation of words -or sentences- which, unlike
standard word embeddings, are learned in an essentially bilingual or even
multilingual context. In view of these properties, the contribution of the
present work is two-fold. First, we systematically study the NMT context
vectors, i.e. output of the encoder, and their power as an interlingua
representation of a sentence. We assess their quality and effectiveness by
measuring similarities across translations, as well as semantically related and
semantically unrelated sentence pairs. Second, as extrinsic evaluation of the
first point, we identify parallel sentences in comparable corpora, obtaining an
F1=98.2% on data from a shared task when using only NMT context vectors. Using
context vectors jointly with similarity measures F1 reaches 98.9%.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
A Continuously Growing Dataset of Sentential Paraphrases
A major challenge in paraphrase research is the lack of parallel corpora. In
this paper, we present a new method to collect large-scale sentential
paraphrases from Twitter by linking tweets through shared URLs. The main
advantage of our method is its simplicity, as it gets rid of the classifier or
human in the loop needed to select data before annotation and subsequent
application of paraphrase identification algorithms in the previous work. We
present the largest human-labeled paraphrase corpus to date of 51,524 sentence
pairs and the first cross-domain benchmarking for automatic paraphrase
identification. In addition, we show that more than 30,000 new sentential
paraphrases can be easily and continuously captured every month at ~70%
precision, and demonstrate their utility for downstream NLP tasks through
phrasal paraphrase extraction. We make our code and data freely available.Comment: 11 pages, accepted to EMNLP 201
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