3 research outputs found
Word-to-Word Models of Translational Equivalence
Parallel texts (bitexts) have properties that distinguish them from other
kinds of parallel data. First, most words translate to only one other word.
Second, bitext correspondence is noisy. This article presents methods for
biasing statistical translation models to reflect these properties. Analysis of
the expected behavior of these biases in the presence of sparse data predicts
that they will result in more accurate models. The prediction is confirmed by
evaluation with respect to a gold standard -- translation models that are
biased in this fashion are significantly more accurate than a baseline
knowledge-poor model. This article also shows how a statistical translation
model can take advantage of various kinds of pre-existing knowledge that might
be available about particular language pairs. Even the simplest kinds of
language-specific knowledge, such as the distinction between content words and
function words, is shown to reliably boost translation model performance on
some tasks. Statistical models that are informed by pre-existing knowledge
about the model domain combine the best of both the rationalist and empiricist
traditions
Parallel Strands: A Preliminary Investigation into Mining the Web for Bilingual Text
Parallel corpora are a valuable resource for machine translation, but at
present their availability and utility is limited by genre- and
domain-specificity, licensing restrictions, and the basic difficulty of
locating parallel texts in all but the most dominant of the world's languages.
A parallel corpus resource not yet explored is the World Wide Web, which hosts
an abundance of pages in parallel translation, offering a potential solution to
some of these problems and unique opportunities of its own. This paper presents
the necessary first step in that exploration: a method for automatically
finding parallel translated documents on the Web. The technique is conceptually
simple, fully language independent, and scalable, and preliminary evaluation
results indicate that the method may be accurate enough to apply without human
intervention.Comment: LaTeX2e, 11 pages, 7 eps figures; uses psfig, llncs.cls, theapa.sty.
An Appendix at http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/amta98/amta98_appendix.html
contains test dat
A Statistical Word-Level Translation Model for Comparable Corpora
In this paper, we present a model of statistical word-level mapping for comparable corpora. The approach is based on the assumption that if two terms have close distributional profiles, their corresponding translations' distributional profiles should be close in a comparable corpus. The proposed model is described. A preliminary investigation on intralanguage comparable corpora is laid out. The preliminary results are >92% accurate, suggesting the feasibility of the model. The model needs to undergo some improvements and should be tested cross linguistically before assessing its significance.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-2000-41, LAMP-TR-048