1,404 research outputs found
Tuning syntactically enhanced word alignment for statistical machine translation
We introduce a syntactically enhanced word alignment model that is more flexible than state-of-the-art generative word
alignment models and can be tuned according to different end tasks. First of all, this model takes the advantages of
both unsupervised and supervised word alignment approaches by obtaining anchor alignments from unsupervised generative
models and seeding the anchor alignments into a supervised discriminative model. Second, this model offers the flexibility of tuning the alignment according to different
optimisation criteria. Our experiments show that using our word alignment in a Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation system yields a 5.38% relative increase
on IWSLT 2007 task in terms of BLEU score
Lattice score based data cleaning for phrase-based statistical machine translation
Statistical machine translation relies heavily
on parallel corpora to train its models
for translation tasks. While more and
more bilingual corpora are readily available,
the quality of the sentence pairs
should be taken into consideration. This
paper presents a novel lattice score-based
data cleaning method to select proper sentence
pairs from the ones extracted from a
bilingual corpus by the sentence alignment
methods. The proposed method is carried
out as follows: firstly, an initial phrasebased
model is trained on the full sentencealigned
corpus; then for each of the sentence
pairs in the corpus, word alignments
are used to create anchor pairs and sourceside
lattices; thirdly, based on the translation
model, target-side phrase networks
are expanded on the lattices and Viterbi
searching is used to find approximated decoding
results; finally, BLEU score thresholds
are used to filter out the low-score
sentence pairs for the data cleaning purpose.
Our experiments on the FBIS corpus
showed improvements of BLEU score
from 23.78 to 24.02 in Chinese-English
Gap between theory and practice: noise sensitive word alignment in machine translation
Word alignment is to estimate a lexical translation probability p(e|f), or to estimate the correspondence g(e, f) where a function g outputs either 0 or 1, between a source word f and a target word e for given bilingual sentences. In practice, this formulation does not consider the existence of ânoiseâ (or outlier) which may cause problems depending on the corpus. N-to-m mapping objects, such as paraphrases, non-literal translations, and multiword
expressions, may appear as both noise and also as valid training data. From this perspective, this paper tries to answer the following two questions: 1) how to detect stable
patterns where noise seems legitimate, and 2) how to reduce such noise, where applicable, by supplying extra information as prior knowledge to a word aligner
Exploiting alignment techniques in MATREX: the DCU machine translation system for IWSLT 2008
In this paper, we give a description of the machine translation (MT) system developed at DCU that was used for our third participation in the evaluation campaign of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2008). In this participation, we focus on various techniques for word and phrase alignment to improve system quality. Specifically, we try out our word packing and syntax-enhanced word alignment techniques for the ChineseâEnglish task and for the EnglishâChinese task for the first time. For all translation tasks except ArabicâEnglish, we exploit linguistically motivated bilingual phrase pairs extracted from parallel treebanks. We smooth our translation tables with out-of-domain word translations for the ArabicâEnglish and ChineseâEnglish tasks in order to solve the problem of the high number of out of vocabulary items. We also carried out experiments combining both in-domain and out-of-domain data to improve system performance and, finally, we deploy a majority voting procedure combining a language model based method and a translation-based method for case and punctuation restoration. We participated in all the translation
tasks and translated both the single-best ASR hypotheses and
the correct recognition results. The translation results confirm that our new word and phrase alignment techniques are often helpful in improving translation quality, and the data combination method we proposed can significantly improve system performance
Embedding Web-based Statistical Translation Models in Cross-Language Information Retrieval
Although more and more language pairs are covered by machine translation
services, there are still many pairs that lack translation resources.
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is an application which needs
translation functionality of a relatively low level of sophistication since
current models for information retrieval (IR) are still based on a
bag-of-words. The Web provides a vast resource for the automatic construction
of parallel corpora which can be used to train statistical translation models
automatically. The resulting translation models can be embedded in several ways
in a retrieval model. In this paper, we will investigate the problem of
automatically mining parallel texts from the Web and different ways of
integrating the translation models within the retrieval process. Our
experiments on standard test collections for CLIR show that the Web-based
translation models can surpass commercial MT systems in CLIR tasks. These
results open the perspective of constructing a fully automatic query
translation device for CLIR at a very low cost.Comment: 37 page
Transitive probabilistic CLIR models.
Transitive translation could be a useful technique to enlarge the number of supported language pairs for a cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) system in a cost-effective manner. The paper describes several setups for transitive translation based on probabilistic translation models. The transitive CLIR models were evaluated on the CLEF test collection and yielded a retrieval effectiveness\ud
up to 83% of monolingual performance, which is significantly better than a baseline using the synonym operator
Improved phrase-based SMT with syntactic reordering patterns learned from lattice scoring
In this paper, we present a novel approach to incorporate source-side syntactic reordering patterns into phrase-based SMT. The main contribution of this work is to use the lattice scoring approach to exploit and utilize reordering
information that is favoured by the baseline PBSMT system. By referring to the parse trees of the training corpus, we represent the observed reorderings with source-side
syntactic patterns. The extracted patterns are then used to convert the parsed inputs into word lattices, which contain both the original source sentences and their potential reorderings. Weights of the word lattices are estimated from the observations of the syntactic reordering patterns in the training corpus. Finally, the PBSMT system is tuned
and tested on the generated word lattices to show the benefits of adding potential sourceside reorderings in the inputs. We confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed method on a medium-sized corpus for Chinese-English
machine translation task. Our method outperformed the baseline system by 1.67% relative on a randomly selected testset and 8.56% relative on the NIST 2008 testset in terms of BLEU score
Constrained word alignment models for statistical machine translation
Word alignment is a fundamental and crucial component in Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems. Despite the enormous progress made in the past two decades, this task remains an active research topic simply because the quality of word alignment is still far from optimal. Most state-of-the-art word alignment models are grounded on statistical learning theory treating word alignment as a general sequence alignment problem, where many linguistically motivated insights are not incorporated. In this thesis, we propose new word alignment models with linguistically motivated constraints in a bid to improve the quality of word alignment for Phrase-Based SMT systems (PB-SMT). We start the exploration with an investigation
into segmentation constraints for word alignment by proposing a novel algorithm, namely word packing, which is motivated by the fact that one concept expressed by one word in one language can frequently surface as a compound or
collocation in another language. Our algorithm takes advantage of the interaction between segmentation and alignment, starting with some segmentation for both the
source and target language and updating the segmentation with respect to the word alignment results using state-of-the-art word alignment models; thereafter a refined
word alignment can be obtained based on the updated segmentation. In this process, the updated segmentation acts as a hard constraint on the word alignment
models and reduces the complexity of the alignment models by generating more 1-to-1 correspondences through word packing. Experimental results show that this algorithm can lead to statistically significant improvements over the state-of-the-art word alignment models. Given that word packing imposes "hard" segmentation constraints on the word aligner, which is prone to introducing noise, we propose two
new word alignment models using syntactic dependencies as soft constraints. The first model is a syntactically enhanced discriminative word alignment model, where
we use a set of feature functions to express the syntactic dependency information encoded in both source and target languages. One the one hand, this model enjoys
great flexibility in its capacity to incorporate multiple features; on the other hand, this model is designed to facilitate model tuning for different objective functions.
Experimental results show that using syntactic constraints can improve the performance of the discriminative word alignment model, which also leads to better PB-SMT performance compared to using state-of-the-art word alignment models.
The second model is a syntactically constrained generative word alignment model, where we add in a syntactic coherence model over the target phrases in the context of HMM word-to-phrase alignment. The advantages of our model are that (i) the addition of the syntactic coherence model preserves the efficient parameter estimation procedures; and (ii) the flexibility of the model can be increased so that it can
be tuned according to different objective functions. Experimental results show that tuning this model properly leads to a significant gain in MT performance over the
state-of-the-art
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