1,527 research outputs found
Chunk-Based Bi-Scale Decoder for Neural Machine Translation
In typical neural machine translation~(NMT), the decoder generates a sentence
word by word, packing all linguistic granularities in the same time-scale of
RNN. In this paper, we propose a new type of decoder for NMT, which splits the
decode state into two parts and updates them in two different time-scales.
Specifically, we first predict a chunk time-scale state for phrasal modeling,
on top of which multiple word time-scale states are generated. In this way, the
target sentence is translated hierarchically from chunks to words, with
information in different granularities being leveraged. Experiments show that
our proposed model significantly improves the translation performance over the
state-of-the-art NMT model.Comment: Accepted as a short paper by ACL 201
Translating Phrases in Neural Machine Translation
Phrases play an important role in natural language understanding and machine
translation (Sag et al., 2002; Villavicencio et al., 2005). However, it is
difficult to integrate them into current neural machine translation (NMT) which
reads and generates sentences word by word. In this work, we propose a method
to translate phrases in NMT by integrating a phrase memory storing target
phrases from a phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) system into
the encoder-decoder architecture of NMT. At each decoding step, the phrase
memory is first re-written by the SMT model, which dynamically generates
relevant target phrases with contextual information provided by the NMT model.
Then the proposed model reads the phrase memory to make probability estimations
for all phrases in the phrase memory. If phrase generation is carried on, the
NMT decoder selects an appropriate phrase from the memory to perform phrase
translation and updates its decoding state by consuming the words in the
selected phrase. Otherwise, the NMT decoder generates a word from the
vocabulary as the general NMT decoder does. Experiment results on the Chinese
to English translation show that the proposed model achieves significant
improvements over the baseline on various test sets.Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 201
Hybrid example-based SMT: the best of both worlds?
(Way and Gough, 2005) provide an indepth comparison of their Example-Based Machine Translation (EBMT) system with
a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system constructed from freely available tools. According to a wide variety of automatic evaluation metrics, they demonstrated
that their EBMT system outperformed the SMT system by a factor of two to one.
Nevertheless, they did not test their EBMT system against a phrase-based SMT system. Obtaining their training and test
data for English–French, we carry out a number of experiments using the Pharaoh SMT Decoder. While better results are seen when Pharaoh is seeded with Giza++
word- and phrase-based data compared to EBMT sub-sentential alignments, in general better results are obtained when combinations of this 'hybrid' data is used to construct the translation and probability models. While for the most part the EBMT system of (Gough & Way, 2004b) outperforms any flavour of the phrasebased SMT systems constructed in our
experiments, combining the data sets automatically induced by both Giza++ and their EBMT system leads to a hybrid system which improves on the EBMT system per se for French–English
Example-based machine translation of the Basque language
Basque is both a minority and a highly inflected language with free order of sentence constituents. Machine Translation of Basque is thus both a real need and a test bed for MT techniques. In this paper, we present a modular Data-Driven MT system which includes different chunkers as well as chunk aligners which can deal with the free order of sentence constituents of Basque. We conducted Basque to English translation experiments, evaluated on a large corpus
(270, 000 sentence pairs). The experimental results show that our system significantly outperforms state-of-the-art
approaches according to several common automatic evaluation metrics
Target-Side Context for Discriminative Models in Statistical Machine Translation
Discriminative translation models utilizing source context have been shown to
help statistical machine translation performance. We propose a novel extension
of this work using target context information. Surprisingly, we show that this
model can be efficiently integrated directly in the decoding process. Our
approach scales to large training data sizes and results in consistent
improvements in translation quality on four language pairs. We also provide an
analysis comparing the strengths of the baseline source-context model with our
extended source-context and target-context model and we show that our extension
allows us to better capture morphological coherence. Our work is freely
available as part of Moses.Comment: Accepted as a long paper for ACL 201
Comparing rule-based and data-driven approaches to Spanish-to-Basque machine translation
In this paper, we compare the rule-based and data-driven
approaches in the context of Spanish-to-Basque Machine Translation. The rule-based system we consider has been developed specifically for Spanish-to-Basque machine translation, and is tuned to this language pair. On the contrary, the data-driven system we use is generic, and has not been specifically designed to deal with Basque. Spanish-to-Basque Machine Translation is a challenge for data-driven
approaches for at least two reasons. First, there is lack of
bilingual data on which a data-driven MT system can be trained. Second, Basque is a morphologically-rich agglutinative language and translating to Basque requires a huge generation of morphological information, a difficult task for a generic system not specifically tuned to Basque. We present the results of a series of experiments, obtained on two different corpora, one being “in-domain” and the
other one “out-of-domain” with respect to the data-driven
system. We show that n-gram based automatic evaluation and edit-distance-based human evaluation yield two different sets of results. According to BLEU, the data-driven system outperforms the rule-based system on the in-domain data, while according to the human evaluation, the rule-based
approach achieves higher scores for both corpora
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