27,933 research outputs found
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
Incorporating source-language paraphrases into phrase-based SMT with confusion networks
To increase the model coverage, sourcelanguage paraphrases have been utilized to boost SMT system performance. Previous
work showed that word lattices constructed from paraphrases are able to reduce out-ofvocabulary words and to express inputs in different ways for better translation quality.
However, such a word-lattice-based method suffers from two problems: 1) path duplications in word lattices decrease the capacities for potential paraphrases; 2) lattice decoding in SMT dramatically increases the search space and results in poor time efficiency. Therefore, in this paper, we adopt word confusion networks as the input structure to carry source-language paraphrase information. Similar to previous work, we use word lattices to build word confusion networks for merging of duplicated paths and faster decoding. Experiments are carried out on small-, medium- and large-scale English–
Chinese translation tasks, and we show that compared with the word-lattice-based method, the decoding time on three tasks is reduced significantly (up to 79%) while comparable
translation quality is obtained on the largescale task
Concept-based Interactive Query Expansion Support Tool (CIQUEST)
This report describes a three-year project (2000-03) undertaken in the Information Studies
Department at The University of Sheffield and funded by Resource, The Council for
Museums, Archives and Libraries. The overall aim of the research was to provide user
support for query formulation and reformulation in searching large-scale textual resources
including those of the World Wide Web. More specifically the objectives were: to investigate
and evaluate methods for the automatic generation and organisation of concepts derived from
retrieved document sets, based on statistical methods for term weighting; and to conduct
user-based evaluations on the understanding, presentation and retrieval effectiveness of
concept structures in selecting candidate terms for interactive query expansion.
The TREC test collection formed the basis for the seven evaluative experiments conducted in
the course of the project. These formed four distinct phases in the project plan. In the first
phase, a series of experiments was conducted to investigate further techniques for concept
derivation and hierarchical organisation and structure. The second phase was concerned with
user-based validation of the concept structures. Results of phases 1 and 2 informed on the
design of the test system and the user interface was developed in phase 3. The final phase
entailed a user-based summative evaluation of the CiQuest system.
The main findings demonstrate that concept hierarchies can effectively be generated from
sets of retrieved documents and displayed to searchers in a meaningful way. The approach
provides the searcher with an overview of the contents of the retrieved documents, which in
turn facilitates the viewing of documents and selection of the most relevant ones. Concept
hierarchies are a good source of terms for query expansion and can improve precision. The
extraction of descriptive phrases as an alternative source of terms was also effective. With
respect to presentation, cascading menus were easy to browse for selecting terms and for
viewing documents. In conclusion the project dissemination programme and future work are
outlined
Regularizing Neural Machine Translation by Target-bidirectional Agreement
Although Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has achieved remarkable progress in
the past several years, most NMT systems still suffer from a fundamental
shortcoming as in other sequence generation tasks: errors made early in
generation process are fed as inputs to the model and can be quickly amplified,
harming subsequent sequence generation. To address this issue, we propose a
novel model regularization method for NMT training, which aims to improve the
agreement between translations generated by left-to-right (L2R) and
right-to-left (R2L) NMT decoders. This goal is achieved by introducing two
Kullback-Leibler divergence regularization terms into the NMT training
objective to reduce the mismatch between output probabilities of L2R and R2L
models. In addition, we also employ a joint training strategy to allow L2R and
R2L models to improve each other in an interactive update process. Experimental
results show that our proposed method significantly outperforms
state-of-the-art baselines on Chinese-English and English-German translation
tasks.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 201
Retrieving with good sense
Although always present in text, word sense ambiguity only recently became regarded as a problem to information
retrieval which was potentially solvable. The growth of interest in word senses resulted from new directions taken in
disambiguation research. This paper first outlines this research and surveys the resulting efforts in information
retrieval. Although the majority of attempts to improve retrieval effectiveness were unsuccessful, much was learnt
from the research. Most notably a notion of under what circumstance disambiguation may prove of use to retrieval
ON MONITORING LANGUAGE CHANGE WITH THE SUPPORT OF CORPUS PROCESSING
One of the fundamental characteristics of language is that it can change over time. One
method to monitor the change is by observing its corpora: a structured language
documentation. Recent development in technology, especially in the field of Natural
Language Processing allows robust linguistic processing, which support the description of
diverse historical changes of the corpora. The interference of human linguist is inevitable as
it determines the gold standard, but computer assistance provides considerable support by
incorporating computational approach in exploring the corpora, especially historical
corpora. This paper proposes a model for corpus development, where corpus are annotated
to support further computational operations such as lexicogrammatical pattern matching,
automatic retrieval and extraction. The corpus processing operations are performed by local
grammar based corpus processing software on a contemporary Indonesian corpus. This
paper concludes that data collection and data processing in a corpus are equally crucial
importance to monitor language change, and none can be set aside
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