GREAT: open source software for statistical machine translation

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10590-011-9097-6[EN] In this article, the first public release of GREAT as an open-source, statistical machine translation (SMT) software toolkit is described. GREAT is based on a bilingual language modelling approach for SMT, which is so far implemented for n-gram models based on the framework of stochastic finite-state transducers. The use of finite-state models is motivated by their simplicity, their versatility, and the fact that they present a lower computational cost, if compared with other more expressive models. Moreover, if translation is assumed to be a subsequential process, finite-state models are enough for modelling the existing relations between a source and a target language. GREAT includes some characteristics usually present in state-of-the-art SMT, such as phrase-based translation models or a log-linear framework for local features. 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Comparative evaluation of research vs. Online MT systems

This paper reports MT evaluation experiments that were conducted at the end of year 1 of the EU-funded CoSyne 1 project for three language combinations, considering translations from German, Italian and Dutch into English. We present a comparative evaluation of the MT software developed within the project against four of the leading free webbased MT systems across a range of state-of-the-art automatic evaluation metrics. The data sets from the news domain that were created and used for training purposes and also for this evaluation exercise, which are available to the research community, are also described. The evaluation results for the news domain are very encouraging: the CoSyne MT software consistently beats the rule-based MT systems, and for translations from Italian and Dutch into English in particular the scores given by some of the standard automatic evaluation metrics are not too distant from those obtained by wellestablished statistical online MT systems

Partial least squares for word confidence estimation in machine translation

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38628-2_59We present a new technique to estimate the reliability of the words in automatically generated translations. Our approach addresses confidence estimation as a classification problem where a confidence score is to be predicted from a feature vector that represents each translated word. We describe a new set of prediction features designed to capture context information, and propose a model based on partial least squares to perform the classification. Good empirical results are reported in a large-domain news translation task.Work supported by the European Union Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) under the CasMaCat project (grants agreement no 287576), by Spanish MICINN under TIASA (TIN2009-14205-C04-02) project, and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant ALMPR (Prometeo/2009/014).González Rubio, J.; Navarro Cerdán, JR.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2013). Partial least squares for word confidence estimation in machine translation. En Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis. Springer Verlag (Germany). 500-508. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38628-2_59S500508NIST: National Institute of Standards and Technology MT evaluation official results (November 2006), http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/mt/Ueffing, N., Macherey, K., Ney, H.: Confidence measures for statistical machine translation. In: Proc. of the MT Summit, pp. 394–401. Springer (2003)Sanchis, A., Juan, A., Vidal, E.: Estimation of confidence measures for machine translation. In: Proc. of the Machine Translation Summit, pp. 407–412 (2007)Wold, H.: Estimation of Principal Components and Related Models by Iterative Least squares, pp. 391–420. Academic Press, New York (1966)Berger, A.L., Pietra, V.J.D., Pietra, S.A.D.: A maximum entropy approach to natural language processing. Computational Linguistics 22, 39–71 (1996)Levenshtein, V.: Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions and reversals. Soviet Physics Doklady 10(8), 707–710 (1966)Brown, P., Della Pietra, V., Della Pietra, S., Mercer, R.: The mathematics of statistical machine translation: parameter estimation. Computational Linguistics 19, 263–311 (1993)Mevik, B.H., Wehrens, R., Liland, K.H.: pls: Partial Least Squares and Principal Component regression. R package version 2.3-0 (2011)Callison-Burch, C., Koehn, P., Monz, C., Post, M., Soricut, R., Specia, L.: Findings of the 2012 workshop on statistical machine translation. In: Proc. of the Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, Montréal, Canada, pp. 10–51 (June 2012)Chinchor, N.: The statistical significance of the muc-4 results. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Message Understanding, pp. 30–50 (1992

Sentence similarity-based source context modelling in PBSMT

Target phrase selection, a crucial component of the state-of-the-art phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) model, plays a key role in generating accurate translation hypotheses. Inspired by context-rich word-sense disambiguation techniques, machine translation (MT) researchers have successfully integrated various types of source language context into the PBSMT model to improve target phrase selection. Among the various types of lexical and syntactic features, lexical syntactic descriptions in the form of supertags that preserve long-range word-to-word dependencies in a sentence have proven to be effective. These rich contextual features are able to disambiguate a source phrase, on the basis of the local syntactic behaviour of that phrase. In addition to local contextual information, global contextual information such as the grammatical structure of a sentence, sentence length and n-gram word sequences could provide additional important information to enhance this phrase-sense disambiguation. In this work, we explore various sentence similarity features by measuring similarity between a source sentence to be translated with the source-side of the bilingual training sentences and integrate them directly into the PBSMT model. We performed experiments on an English-to-Chinese translation task by applying sentence-similarity features both individually, and collaboratively with supertag-based features. We evaluate the performance of our approach and report a statistically significant relative improvement of 5.25% BLEU score when adding a sentence-similarity feature together with a supertag-based feature

Combining semantic and syntactic generalization in example-based machine translation

In this paper, we report our experiments in combining two EBMT systems that rely on generalized templates, Marclator and CMU-EBMT, on an English–German translation task. Our goal was to see whether a statistically significant improvement could be achieved over the individual performances of these two systems. We observed that this was not the case. However, our system consistently outperformed a lexical EBMT baseline system

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

Neural fuzzy repair : integrating fuzzy matches into neural machine translation

We present a simple yet powerful data augmentation method for boosting Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performance by leveraging information retrieved from a Translation Memory (TM). We propose and test two methods for augmenting NMT training data with fuzzy TM matches. Tests on the DGT-TM data set for two language pairs show consistent and substantial improvements over a range of baseline systems. The results suggest that this method is promising for any translation environment in which a sizeable TM is available and a certain amount of repetition across translations is to be expected, especially considering its ease of implementation