Machine Translation of Arabic Dialects

This thesis discusses different approaches to machine translation (MT) from Dialectal Arabic (DA) to English. These approaches handle the varying stages of Arabic dialects in terms of types of available resources and amounts of training data. The overall theme of this work revolves around building dialectal resources and MT systems or enriching existing ones using the currently available resources (dialectal or standard) in order to quickly and cheaply scale to more dialects without the need to spend years and millions of dollars to create such resources for every dialect. Unlike Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), DA-English parallel corpora is scarcely available for few dialects only. Dialects differ from each other and from MSA in orthography, morphology, phonology, and to some lesser degree syntax. This means that combining all available parallel data, from dialects and MSA, to train DA-to-English statistical machine translation (SMT) systems might not provide the desired results. Similarly, translating dialectal sentences with an SMT system trained on that dialect only is also challenging due to different factors that affect the sentence word choices against that of the SMT training data. Such factors include the level of dialectness (e.g., code switching to MSA versus dialectal training data), topic (sports versus politics), genre (tweets versus newspaper), script (Arabizi versus Arabic), and timespan of test against training. The work we present utilizes any available Arabic resource such as a preprocessing tool or a parallel corpus, whether MSA or DA, to improve DA-to-English translation and expand to more dialects and sub-dialects. The majority of Arabic dialects have no parallel data to English or to any other foreign language. They also have no preprocessing tools such as normalizers, morphological analyzers, or tokenizers. For such dialects, we present an MSA-pivoting approach where DA sentences are translated to MSA first, then the MSA output is translated to English using the wealth of MSA-English parallel data. Since there is virtually no DA-MSA parallel data to train an SMT system, we build a rule-based DA-to-MSA MT system, ELISSA, that uses morpho-syntactic translation rules along with dialect identification and language modeling components. We also present a rule-based approach to quickly and cheaply build a dialectal morphological analyzer, ADAM, which provides ELISSA with dialectal word analyses. Other Arabic dialects have a relatively small-sized DA-English parallel data amounting to a few million words on the DA side. Some of these dialects have dialect-dependent preprocessing tools that can be used to prepare the DA data for SMT systems. We present techniques to generate synthetic parallel data from the available DA-English and MSA- English data. We use this synthetic data to build statistical and hybrid versions of ELISSA as well as improve our rule-based ELISSA-based MSA-pivoting approach. We evaluate our best MSA-pivoting MT pipeline against three direct SMT baselines trained on these three parallel corpora: DA-English data only, MSA-English data only, and the combination of DA-English and MSA-English data. Furthermore, we leverage the use of these four MT systems (the three baselines along with our MSA-pivoting system) in two system combination approaches that benefit from their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. Finally, we propose an approach to model dialects from monolingual data and limited DA-English parallel data without the need for any language-dependent preprocessing tools. We learn DA preprocessing rules using word embedding and expectation maximization. We test this approach by building a morphological segmentation system and we evaluate its performance on MT against the state-of-the-art dialectal tokenization tool

Creating a strong statistical machine translation system by combining different decoders

Machine translation is a very important field in Natural Language Processing. The need for machine translation arises due to the increasing amount of data available online. Most of our data now is digital and this is expected to increase over time. Since human manual translation takes a lot of time and effort, machine translation is needed to cover all of the languages available. A lot of research has been done to make machine translation faster and more reliable between different language pairs. Machine translation is now being coupled with deep learning and neural networks. New topics in machine translation are being studied and tested like applying neural machine translation as a replacement to the classical statistical machine translation. In this thesis, we also study the effect of data-preprocessing and decoder type on translation output. We then demonstrate two ways to enhance translation from English to Arabic. The first approach uses a two-decoder system; the first decoder translates from English to Arabic and the second is a post-processing decoder that retranslates the first Arabic output to Arabic again to fix some of the translation errors. We then study the results of different kinds of decoders and their contributions to the test set. The results of this study lead to the second approach which combines different decoders to create a stronger one. The second approach uses a classifier to categorize the English sentences based on their structure. The output of the classifier is the decoder that is suited best to translate the English sentence. Both approaches increased the BLEU score albeit with different ranges. The classifier showed an increase of ~0.1 BLEU points while the post-processing decoder showed an increase of between ~0.3~11 BLEU points on two different test sets. Eventually we compare our results to Google translate to know how well we are doing in comparison to a well-known translator. Our best translation machine system scored 5 absolute points compared to Google translate in ISI corpus test set and we were 9 absolute points lower in the case of the UN corpus test set

Workshop on statistical machine translation for curious translators

El autor era colaborador honorífico del Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos en diciembre de 2016.Presentación de diapositivas del taller "Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation for Curious Translators", impartido por Víctor Manuel Sánchez Cartagena en la Universidad de Alicante en diciembre de 2016

Providing morphological information for SMT using neural networks

Treating morphologically complex words (MCWs) as atomic units in translation would not yield a desirable result. Such words are complicated constituents with meaningful subunits. A complex word in a morphologically rich language (MRL) could be associated with a number of words or even a full sentence in a simpler language, which means the surface form of complex words should be accompanied with auxiliary morphological information in order to provide a precise translation and a better alignment. In this paper we follow this idea and propose two different methods to convey such information for statistical machine translation (SMT) models. In the first model we enrich factored SMT engines by introducing a new morphological factor which relies on subword-aware word embeddings. In the second model we focus on the language-modeling component. We explore a subword-level neural language model (NLM) to capture sequence-, word- and subword-level dependencies. Our NLM is able to approximate better scores for conditional word probabilities, so the decoder generates more fluent translations. We studied two languages Farsi and German in our experiments and observed significant improvements for both of them

Text Representation for Nonconcatenative Morphology

The last six years have seen the immense improvement of the NMT in terms of translation quality. With the help of the neural networks, the NMT has been able to achieve the state-of-the-art results in transla- tion quality. However, the NMT is still not able to achieve translation quality near human levels. In this thesis, we propose new approaches to improve the language representation as input to the NMT. This can be achieved by exploiting language specific knowledge, such as phonetic alterations, the morphology, and the syntax. We propose a new approach to improve the language representation by exploiting mor- phological phenomena in Turkish and Hebrew and show that the proposed segmentation approaches can improve translation quality. We have used several different segmentation approaches and compared them with each other. All of the segmentation approaches are rooted in the language specific morphological analysis of Turkish and Hebrew. We have also looked at the effect of the specific segmentation approach on translation quality. We have trained six different models of the type transformer with different seg- mentation approaches and compared them with each other. For each of the segmentation approaches, we have evaluated the translation quality using two automatic metrics and the human evaluation. We have also observed that the segmentation approaches can improve the translation quality in the case of the human evaluation, but not in the case of the automatic metrics. We have emphasized the importance of the human evaluation for NMT, and have shown that the automatic metrics can often be misleading

EUSMT: incorporating linguistic information to SMT for a morphologically rich language. Its use in SMT-RBMT-EBMT hybridation

148 p.: graf.This thesis is defined in the framework of machine translation for Basque. Having developed a Rule-Based Machine Translation (RBMT) system for Basque in the IXA group (Mayor, 2007), we decided to tackle the Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) approach and experiment on how we could adapt it to the peculiarities of the Basque language. First, we analyzed the impact of the agglutinative nature of Basque and the best way to deal with it. In order to deal with the problems presented above, we have split up Basque words into the lemma and some tags which represent the morphological information expressed by the inflection. By dividing each Basque word in this way, we aim to reduce the sparseness produced by the agglutinative nature of Basque and the small amount of training data. Similarly, we also studied the differences in word order between Spanish and Basque, examining different techniques for dealing with them. we confirm the weakness of the basic SMT in dealing with great word order differences in the source and target languages. Distance-based reordering, which is the technique used by the baseline system, does not have enough information to properly handle great word order differences, so any of the techniques tested in this work (based on both statistics and manually generated rules) outperforms the baseline. Once we had obtained a more accurate SMT system, we started the first attempts to combine different MT systems into a hybrid one that would allow us to get the best of the different paradigms. The hybridization attempts carried out in this PhD dissertation are preliminaries, but, even so, this work can help us to determine the ongoing steps. This thesis is defined in the framework of machine translation for Basque. Having developed a Rule-Based Machine Translation (RBMT) system for Basque in the IXA group (Mayor, 2007), we decided to tackle the Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) approach and experiment on how we could adapt it to the peculiarities of the Basque language. First, we analyzed the impact of the agglutinative nature of Basque and the best way to deal with it. In order to deal with the problems presented above, we have split up Basque words into the lemma and some tags which represent the morphological information expressed by the inflection. By dividing each Basque word in this way, we aim to reduce the sparseness produced by the agglutinative nature of Basque and the small amount of training data. Similarly, we also studied the differences in word order between Spanish and Basque, examining different techniques for dealing with them. we confirm the weakness of the basic SMT in dealing with great word order differences in the source and target languages. Distance-based reordering, which is the technique used by the baseline system, does not have enough information to properly handle great word order differences, so any of the techniques tested in this work (based on both statistics and manually generated rules) outperforms the baseline. Once we had obtained a more accurate SMT system, we started the first attempts to combine different MT systems into a hybrid one that would allow us to get the best of the different paradigms. The hybridization attempts carried out in this PhD dissertation are preliminaries, but, even so, this work can help us to determine the ongoing steps.Eusko Jaurlaritzaren ikertzaileak prestatzeko beka batekin (BFI05.326)eginda