137 research outputs found
Tracking relevant alignment characteristics for machine translation
In most statistical machine translation (SMT) systems, bilingual segments are extracted via word alignment. In this paper we compare alignments tuned directly according to alignment F-score and BLEU score in order to investigate
the alignment characteristics that are helpful in translation. We report results for two different SMT systems (a phrase-based and an n-gram-based system) on Chinese to English IWSLT data, and Spanish to English
European Parliament data. We give alignment hints to improve BLEU score, depending on the SMT system used and the type of corpus
The TALP & I2R SMT Systems for IWSLT 2008
This paper gives a description of the statistical machine
translation (SMT) systems developed at the TALP Research
Center of the UPC (Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya)
for our participation in the IWSLT’08 evaluation campaign.
We present Ngram-based (TALPtuples) and phrase-based
(TALPphrases) SMT systems. The paper explains the 2008
systems’ architecture and outlines translation schemes we
have used, mainly focusing on the new techniques that are
challenged to improve speech-to-speech translation quality.
The novelties we have introduced are: improved reordering
method, linear combination of translation and reordering
models and new technique dealing with punctuation marks
insertion for a phrase-based SMT system.
This year we focus on the Arabic-English, Chinese-Spanish and pivot Chinese-(English)-Spanish translation
tasks.Postprint (published version
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
A Survey of Word Reordering in Statistical Machine Translation: Computational Models and Language Phenomena
Word reordering is one of the most difficult aspects of statistical machine
translation (SMT), and an important factor of its quality and efficiency.
Despite the vast amount of research published to date, the interest of the
community in this problem has not decreased, and no single method appears to be
strongly dominant across language pairs. Instead, the choice of the optimal
approach for a new translation task still seems to be mostly driven by
empirical trials. To orientate the reader in this vast and complex research
area, we present a comprehensive survey of word reordering viewed as a
statistical modeling challenge and as a natural language phenomenon. The survey
describes in detail how word reordering is modeled within different
string-based and tree-based SMT frameworks and as a stand-alone task, including
systematic overviews of the literature in advanced reordering modeling. We then
question why some approaches are more successful than others in different
language pairs. We argue that, besides measuring the amount of reordering, it
is important to understand which kinds of reordering occur in a given language
pair. To this end, we conduct a qualitative analysis of word reordering
phenomena in a diverse sample of language pairs, based on a large collection of
linguistic knowledge. Empirical results in the SMT literature are shown to
support the hypothesis that a few linguistic facts can be very useful to
anticipate the reordering characteristics of a language pair and to select the
SMT framework that best suits them.Comment: 44 pages, to appear in Computational Linguistic
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
Discriminative Reordering Models for Statistical Machine Translation
We present discriminative reordering models for phrase-based statistical machine translation. The models are trained using the maximum entropy principle. We use several types of features: based on words, based on word classes, based on the local context. We evaluate the overall performance of the reordering models as well as the contribution of the individual feature types on a word-aligned corpus. Additionally, we show improved translation performance using these reordering models compared to a state-of-the-art baseline system.
Reordering in statistical machine translation
PhDMachine translation is a challenging task that its difficulties arise from several characteristics
of natural language. The main focus of this work is on reordering as one of
the major problems in MT and statistical MT, which is the method investigated in this
research. The reordering problem in SMT originates from the fact that not all the words
in a sentence can be consecutively translated. This means words must be skipped and
be translated out of their order in the source sentence to produce a fluent and grammatically
correct sentence in the target language. The main reason that reordering is
needed is the fundamental word order differences between languages. Therefore, reordering
becomes a more dominant issue, the more source and target languages are
structurally different.
The aim of this thesis is to study the reordering phenomenon by proposing new methods
of dealing with reordering in SMT decoders and evaluating the effectiveness of
the methods and the importance of reordering in the context of natural language processing
tasks. In other words, we propose novel ways of performing the decoding to
improve the reordering capabilities of the SMT decoder and in addition we explore
the effect of improving the reordering on the quality of specific NLP tasks, namely
named entity recognition and cross-lingual text association. Meanwhile, we go beyond
reordering in text association and present a method to perform cross-lingual text fragment
alignment, based on models of divergence from randomness.
The main contribution of this thesis is a novel method named dynamic distortion,
which is designed to improve the ability of the phrase-based decoder in performing
reordering by adjusting the distortion parameter based on the translation context. The
model employs a discriminative reordering model, which is combining several fea-
2
tures including lexical and syntactic, to predict the necessary distortion limit for each
sentence and each hypothesis expansion. The discriminative reordering model is also
integrated into the decoder as an extra feature. The method achieves substantial improvements
over the baseline without increase in the decoding time by avoiding reordering
in unnecessary positions.
Another novel method is also presented to extend the phrase-based decoder to dynamically
chunk, reorder, and apply phrase translations in tandem. Words inside the chunks
are moved together to enable the decoder to make long-distance reorderings to capture
the word order differences between languages with different sentence structures.
Another aspect of this work is the task-based evaluation of the reordering methods and
other translation algorithms used in the phrase-based SMT systems. With more successful
SMT systems, performing multi-lingual and cross-lingual tasks through translating
becomes more feasible. We have devised a method to evaluate the performance
of state-of-the art named entity recognisers on the text translated by a SMT decoder.
Specifically, we investigated the effect of word reordering and incorporating reordering
models in improving the quality of named entity extraction.
In addition to empirically investigating the effect of translation in the context of crosslingual
document association, we have described a text fragment alignment algorithm
to find sections of the two documents in different languages, that are content-wise related.
The algorithm uses similarity measures based on divergence from randomness
and word-based translation models to perform text fragment alignment on a collection
of documents in two different languages.
All the methods proposed in this thesis are extensively empirically examined. We have
tested all the algorithms on common translation collections used in different evaluation
campaigns. Well known automatic evaluation metrics are used to compare the
suggested methods to a state-of-the art baseline and results are analysed and discussed
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