Problems of english-german automatic translation

The aim of any Automatic Translation project is to give a mechanical procedure for finding an equivalent expression in the target language to any sentence in the source language. The aim of my linguistic translation project is to find the corresponding structures of the languages dealt with. The two main problems that have to be solved by such a project are the difference of word order between the source language and the target language and the ambiguous words of the source language for which the appropriate word in the target language has to be chosen. The first problem is of major linguistic interest: once the project has been worked out, it will give us the parallel sentence structures for the two languages in question. Since there is no complete analysis of any language that could be used for the purpose of automatic translation, we decided to build up our project sentence by sentence. The rules which are needed for translating each sentence will have to be included in the complete program anyway, and the translation may be checked and corrected immediately. The program is split up into subroutines for each word-class, so that a correction of the program in case of an unsatisfactory translation does not complicate the program unnecessarily

Multilingual search for cultural heritage archives via combining multiple translation resources

The linguistic features of material in Cultural Heritage (CH) archives may be in various languages requiring a facility for effective multilingual search. The specialised language often associated with CH content introduces problems for automatic translation to support search applications. The MultiMatch project is focused on enabling users to interact with CH content across different media types and languages. We present results from a MultiMatch study exploring various translation techniques for the CH domain. Our experiments examine translation techniques for the English language CLEF 2006 Cross-Language Speech Retrieval (CL-SR) task using Spanish, French and German queries. Results compare effectiveness of our query translation against a monolingual baseline and show improvement when combining a domain-specific translation lexicon with a standard machine translation system

A retrospective view on the promise on machine translation for Bahasa Melayu-English

Research and development activities for machine translation systems from English language to others are more progressive than vice versa. It has been more than 30 years since the machine translation was introduced and yet a Malay language or Bahasa Melayu (BM) to English machine translation engine is not available. Consequently, many translation systems have been developed for the world's top 10 languages in terms of native speakers, but none for BM, although the language is used by more than 200 million speakers around the world. This paper attempts to seek possible reasons as why such situation occurs. A summative overview to show progress, challenges as well as future works on MT is presented. Issues faced by researchers and system developers in modeling and developing a machine translation engine are also discussed. The study of the previous translation systems (from other languages to English) reveals that the accuracy level can be achieved up to 85 %. The figure suggests that the translation system is not reliable if it is to be utilized in a serious translation activity. The most prominent difficulties are the complexity of grammar rules and ambiguity problems of the source language. Thus, we hypothesize that the inclusion of ‘semantic’ property in the translation rules may produce a better quality BM-English MT engine

The impact of morphological errors in phrase-based statistical machine translation from German and English into Swedish

We have investigated the potential for improvement in target language morphology when translating into Swedish from English and German, by measuring the errors made by a state of the art phrase-based statistical machine translation system. Our results show that there is indeed a performance gap to be filled by better modelling of inflectional morphology and compounding; and that the gap is not filled by simply feeding the translation system with more training data

F-structure transfer-based statistical machine translation

In this paper, we describe a statistical deep syntactic transfer decoder that is trained fully automatically on parsed bilingual corpora. Deep syntactic transfer rules are induced automatically from the f-structures of a LFG parsed bitext corpus by automatically aligning local f-structures, and inducing all rules consistent with the node alignment. The transfer decoder outputs the n-best TL f-structures given a SL f-structure as input by applying large numbers of transfer rules and searching for the best output using a log-linear model to combine feature scores. The decoder includes a fully integrated dependency-based tri-gram language model. We include an experimental evaluation of the decoder using different parsing disambiguation resources for the German data to provide a comparison of how the system performs with different German training and test parses

Dublin City University at CLEF 2007: Cross-Language Speech Retrieval Experiments

The Dublin City University participation in the CLEF 2007 CL-SR English task concentrated primarily on issues of topic translation. Our retrieval system used the BM25F model and pseudo relevance feedback. Topics were translated into English using the Yahoo! BabelFish free online service combined with domain-specific translation lexicons gathered automatically from Wikipedia. We explored alternative topic translation methods using these resources. Our results indicate that extending machine translation tools using automatically generated domainspecific translation lexicons can provide improved CLIR effectiveness for this task

Analysis of errors in the automatic translation of questions for translingual QA systems

Purpose – This study aims to focus on the evaluation of systems for the automatic translation of questions destined to translingual question-answer (QA) systems. The efficacy of online translators when performing as tools in QA systems is analysed using a collection of documents in the Spanish language. Design/methodology/approach – Automatic translation is evaluated in terms of the functionality of actual translations produced by three online translators (Google Translator, Promt Translator, and Worldlingo) by means of objective and subjective evaluation measures, and the typology of errors produced was identified. For this purpose, a comparative study of the quality of the translation of factual questions of the CLEF collection of queries was carried out, from German and French to Spanish. Findings – It was observed that the rates of error for the three systems evaluated here are greater in the translations pertaining to the language pair German-Spanish. Promt was identified as the most reliable translator of the three (on average) for the two linguistic combinations evaluated. However, for the Spanish-German pair, a good assessment of the Google online translator was obtained as well. Most errors (46.38 percent) tended to be of a lexical nature, followed by those due to a poor translation of the interrogative particle of the query (31.16 percent). Originality/value – The evaluation methodology applied focuses above all on the finality of the translation. That is, does the resulting question serve as effective input into a translingual QA system? Thus, instead of searching for “perfection”, the functionality of the question and its capacity to lead one to an adequate response are appraised. The results obtained contribute to the development of improved translingual QA systems

Language-based multimedia information retrieval

This paper describes various methods and approaches for language-based multimedia information retrieval, which have been developed in the projects POP-EYE and OLIVE and which will be developed further in the MUMIS project. All of these project aim at supporting automated indexing of video material by use of human language technologies. Thus, in contrast to image or sound-based retrieval methods, where both the query language and the indexing methods build on non-linguistic data, these methods attempt to exploit advanced text retrieval technologies for the retrieval of non-textual material. While POP-EYE was building on subtitles or captions as the prime language key for disclosing video fragments, OLIVE is making use of speech recognition to automatically derive transcriptions of the sound tracks, generating time-coded linguistic elements which then serve as the basis for text-based retrieval functionality

TermEval: an automatic metric for evaluating terminology translation in MT

Terminology translation plays a crucial role in domain-specific machine translation (MT). Preservation of domain-knowledge from source to target is arguably the most concerning factor for the customers in translation industry, especially for critical domains such as medical, transportation, military, legal and aerospace. However, evaluation of terminology translation, despite its huge importance in the translation industry, has been a less examined area in MT research. Term translation quality in MT is usually measured with domain experts, either in academia or industry. To the best of our knowledge, as of yet there is no publicly available solution to automatically evaluate terminology translation in MT. In particular, manual intervention is often needed to evaluate terminology translation in MT, which, by nature, is a time-consuming and highly expensive task. In fact, this is unimaginable in an industrial setting where customised MT systems are often needed to be updated for many reasons (e.g. availability of new training data or leading MT techniques). Hence, there is a genuine need to have a faster and less expensive solution to this problem, which could aid the end-users to instantly identify term translation problems in MT. In this study, we propose an automatic evaluation metric, TermEval, for evaluating terminology translation in MT. To the best of our knowledge, there is no gold-standard dataset available for measuring terminology translation quality in MT. In the absence of gold standard evaluation test set, we semi-automatically create a gold-standard dataset from English--Hindi judicial domain parallel corpus. We trained state-of-the-art phrase-based SMT (PB-SMT) and neural MT (NMT) models on two translation directions: English-to-Hindi and Hindi-to-English, and use TermEval to evaluate their performance on terminology translation over the created gold standard test set. In order to measure the correlation between TermEval scores and human judgments, translations of each source terms (of the gold standard test set) is validated with human evaluator. High correlation between TermEval and human judgements manifests the effectiveness of the proposed terminology translation evaluation metric. We also carry out comprehensive manual evaluation on terminology translation and present our observations

Lost in translation: the problems of using mainstream MT evaluation metrics for sign language translation

In this paper we consider the problems of applying corpus-based techniques to minority languages that are neither politically recognised nor have a formally accepted writing system, namely sign languages. We discuss the adoption of an annotated form of sign language data as a suitable corpus for the development of a data-driven machine translation (MT) system, and deal with issues that arise from its use. Useful software tools that facilitate easy annotation of video data are also discussed. Furthermore, we address the problems of using traditional MT evaluation metrics for sign language translation. Based on the candidate translations produced from our example-based machine translation system, we discuss why standard metrics fall short of providing an accurate evaluation and suggest more suitable evaluation methods