10,193 research outputs found
An incremental three-pass system combination framework by combining multiple hypothesis alignment methods
System combination has been applied successfully to various machine translation tasks in recent years. As is known, the hypothesis alignment method is a critical factor for the
translation quality of system combination. To date, many effective hypothesis alignment metrics have been proposed and applied to the system combination, such as TER, HMM,
ITER, IHMM, and SSCI. In addition, Minimum Bayes-risk (MBR) decoding and confusion networks (CN) have become state-of-the-art techniques in system combination. In this paper,
we examine different hypothesis alignment approaches and investigate how much the hypothesis alignment results impact on system combination, and finally present a three-pass system combination strategy that can combine hypothesis alignment results derived from multiple alignment metrics to generate a better translation. Firstly, these different alignment metrics are carried out to align the backbone and hypotheses, and the individual CNs are built corresponding to each set of alignment results; then we construct a âsuper networkâ by merging the multiple metric-based CNs to generate a consensus output. Finally a modified MBR network approach is employed to find the best overall translation. Our proposed strategy outperforms the best single confusion network as well as the best single system in our experiments on the NIST Chinese-to-English test set and the WMT2009 English-to-French system combination shared test set
MultiMWE: building a multi-lingual multi-word expression (MWE) parallel corpora
Multi-word expressions (MWEs) are a hot topic in research in natural language processing (NLP), including topics such as MWE detection, MWE decomposition, and research investigating the exploitation of MWEs in other NLP fields such as Machine Translation. However, the availability of bilingual or multi-lingual MWE corpora is very limited. The only bilingual MWE corpora that we are aware of is from the PARSEME (PARSing and Multi-word Expressions) EU project. This is a small collection of only 871 pairs of English-German MWEs. In this paper, we present multi-lingual and bilingual MWE corpora that we have extracted from root parallel corpora. Our collections are 3,159,226 and 143,042 bilingual MWE pairs for German-English and Chinese-English respectively after filtering. We examine the quality of these extracted bilingual MWEs in MT experiments. Our initial experiments applying MWEs in MT show improved translation performances on MWE terms in qualitative analysis and better general evaluation scores in quantitative analysis, on both German-English and Chinese-English language pairs. We follow a standard experimental pipeline to create our MultiMWE corpora which are available online. Researchers can use this free corpus for their own models or use them in a knowledge base as model features
Learning Spatial-Semantic Context with Fully Convolutional Recurrent Network for Online Handwritten Chinese Text Recognition
Online handwritten Chinese text recognition (OHCTR) is a challenging problem
as it involves a large-scale character set, ambiguous segmentation, and
variable-length input sequences. In this paper, we exploit the outstanding
capability of path signature to translate online pen-tip trajectories into
informative signature feature maps using a sliding window-based method,
successfully capturing the analytic and geometric properties of pen strokes
with strong local invariance and robustness. A multi-spatial-context fully
convolutional recurrent network (MCFCRN) is proposed to exploit the multiple
spatial contexts from the signature feature maps and generate a prediction
sequence while completely avoiding the difficult segmentation problem.
Furthermore, an implicit language model is developed to make predictions based
on semantic context within a predicting feature sequence, providing a new
perspective for incorporating lexicon constraints and prior knowledge about a
certain language in the recognition procedure. Experiments on two standard
benchmarks, Dataset-CASIA and Dataset-ICDAR, yielded outstanding results, with
correct rates of 97.10% and 97.15%, respectively, which are significantly
better than the best result reported thus far in the literature.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure
Getting Past the Language Gap: Innovations in Machine Translation
In this chapter, we will be reviewing state of the art machine translation systems, and will discuss innovative methods for machine translation, highlighting the most promising techniques and applications. Machine translation (MT) has benefited from a revitalization in the last 10 years or so, after a period of relatively slow activity. In 2005 the field received a jumpstart when a powerful complete experimental package for building MT systems from scratch became freely available as a result of the unified efforts of the MOSES international consortium. Around the same time, hierarchical methods had been introduced by Chinese researchers, which allowed the introduction and use of syntactic information in translation modeling. Furthermore, the advances in the related field of computational linguistics, making off-the-shelf taggers and parsers readily available, helped give MT an additional boost. Yet there is still more progress to be made. For example, MT will be enhanced greatly when both syntax and semantics are on board: this still presents a major challenge though many advanced research groups are currently pursuing ways to meet this challenge head-on. The next generation of MT will consist of a collection of hybrid systems. It also augurs well for the mobile environment, as we look forward to more advanced and improved technologies that enable the working of Speech-To-Speech machine translation on hand-held devices, i.e. speech recognition and speech synthesis. We review all of these developments and point out in the final section some of the most promising research avenues for the future of MT
Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles
Audio-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, but achieving
realistic, human-like performance is still unsolved. This is due to the lack of
available 3D datasets, models, and standard evaluation metrics. To address
this, we introduce a unique 4D face dataset with about 29 minutes of 4D scans
captured at 60 fps and synchronized audio from 12 speakers. We then train a
neural network on our dataset that factors identity from facial motion. The
learned model, VOCA (Voice Operated Character Animation) takes any speech
signal as input - even speech in languages other than English - and
realistically animates a wide range of adult faces. Conditioning on subject
labels during training allows the model to learn a variety of realistic
speaking styles. VOCA also provides animator controls to alter speaking style,
identity-dependent facial shape, and pose (i.e. head, jaw, and eyeball
rotations) during animation. To our knowledge, VOCA is the only realistic 3D
facial animation model that is readily applicable to unseen subjects without
retargeting. This makes VOCA suitable for tasks like in-game video, virtual
reality avatars, or any scenario in which the speaker, speech, or language is
not known in advance. We make the dataset and model available for research
purposes at http://voca.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201
Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies
Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR
Tackling Sequence to Sequence Mapping Problems with Neural Networks
In Natural Language Processing (NLP), it is important to detect the
relationship between two sequences or to generate a sequence of tokens given
another observed sequence. We call the type of problems on modelling sequence
pairs as sequence to sequence (seq2seq) mapping problems. A lot of research has
been devoted to finding ways of tackling these problems, with traditional
approaches relying on a combination of hand-crafted features, alignment models,
segmentation heuristics, and external linguistic resources. Although great
progress has been made, these traditional approaches suffer from various
drawbacks, such as complicated pipeline, laborious feature engineering, and the
difficulty for domain adaptation. Recently, neural networks emerged as a
promising solution to many problems in NLP, speech recognition, and computer
vision. Neural models are powerful because they can be trained end to end,
generalise well to unseen examples, and the same framework can be easily
adapted to a new domain.
The aim of this thesis is to advance the state-of-the-art in seq2seq mapping
problems with neural networks. We explore solutions from three major aspects:
investigating neural models for representing sequences, modelling interactions
between sequences, and using unpaired data to boost the performance of neural
models. For each aspect, we propose novel models and evaluate their efficacy on
various tasks of seq2seq mapping.Comment: PhD thesi
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