Leveraging online user feedback to improve statistical machine translation

In this article we present a three-step methodology for dynamically improving a statistical machine translation (SMT) system by incorporating human feedback in the form of free edits on the system translations. We target at feedback provided by casual users, which is typically error-prone. Thus, we first propose a filtering step to automatically identify the better user-edited translations and discard the useless ones. A second step produces a pivot-based alignment between source and user-edited sentences, focusing on the errors made by the system. Finally, a third step produces a new translation model and combines it linearly with the one from the original system. We perform a thorough evaluation on a real-world dataset collected from the Reverso.net translation service and show that every step in our methodology contributes significantly to improve a general purpose SMT system. Interestingly, the quality improvement is not only due to the increase of lexical coverage, but to a better lexical selection, reordering, and morphology. Finally, we show the robustness of the methodology by applying it to a different scenario, in which the new examples come from an automatically Web-crawled parallel corpus. Using exactly the same architecture and models provides again a significant improvement of the translation quality of a general purpose baseline SMT system.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Yet Another Ranking Function for Automatic Multiword Term Extraction

International audienceTerm extraction is an essential task in domain knowledge acquisition. We propose two new measures to extract multiword terms from a domain-specific text. The first measure is both linguistic and statistical based. The second measure is graph-based, allowing assessment of the importance of a multiword term of a domain. Existing measures often solve some problems related (but not completely) to term extraction, e.g., noise, silence, low frequency, large-corpora, complexity of the multiword term extraction process. Instead, we focus on managing the entire set of problems, e.g., detecting rare terms and overcoming the low frequency issue. We show that the two proposed measures outperform precision results previously reported for automatic multiword extraction by comparing them with the state-of-the-art reference measures

Cross-Language Plagiarism Detection

Cross-language plagiarism detection deals with the automatic identification and extraction of plagiarism in a multilingual setting. In this setting, a suspicious document is given, and the task is to retrieve all sections from the document that originate from a large, multilingual document collection. Our contributions in this field are as follows: (1) a comprehensive retrieval process for cross-language plagiarism detection is introduced, highlighting the differences to monolingual plagiarism detection, (2) state-of-the-art solutions for two important subtasks are reviewed, (3) retrieval models for the assessment of cross-language similarity are surveyed, and, (4) the three models CL-CNG, CL-ESA and CL-ASA are compared. Our evaluation is of realistic scale: it relies on 120,000 test documents which are selected from the corpora JRC-Acquis and Wikipedia, so that for each test document highly similar documents are available in all of the six languages English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Polish. The models are employed in a series of ranking tasks, and more than 100 million similarities are computed with each model. The results of our evaluation indicate that CL-CNG, despite its simple approach, is the best choice to rank and compare texts across languages if they are syntactically related. CL-ESA almost matches the performance of CL-CNG, but on arbitrary pairs of languages. CL-ASA works best on "exact" translations but does not generalize well.This work was partially supported by the TEXT-ENTERPRISE 2.0 TIN2009-13391-C04-03 project and the CONACyT-Mexico 192021 grant.Potthast, M.; Barrón Cedeño, LA.; Stein, B.; Rosso, P. (2011). Cross-Language Plagiarism Detection. Language Resources and Evaluation. 45(1):45-62. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-009-9114-zS4562451Ballesteros, L. A. (2001). Resolving ambiguity for cross-language information retrieval: A dictionary approach. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA, Bruce Croft.Barrón-Cedeño, A., Rosso, P., Pinto, D., & Juan A. (2008). On cross-lingual plagiarism analysis using a statistical model. In S. Benno, S. Efstathios, & K. Moshe (Eds.), ECAI 2008 workshop on uncovering plagiarism, authorship, and social software misuse (PAN 08) (pp. 9–13). Patras, Greece.Baum, L. E. (1972). An inequality and associated maximization technique in statistical estimation of probabilistic functions of a Markov process. Inequalities, 3, 1–8.Berger, A., & Lafferty, J. (1999). Information retrieval as statistical translation. In SIGIR’99: Proceedings of the 22nd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval (vol. 4629, pp. 222–229). Berkeley, California, United States: ACM.Brin, S., Davis, J., & Garcia-Molina, H. (1995). Copy detection mechanisms for digital documents. In SIGMOD ’95 (pp. 398–409). New York, NY, USA: ACM Press.Brown, P. F., Della Pietra, S. A., Della Pietra, V. J., & Mercer R. L. (1993). The mathematics of statistical machine translation: Parameter estimation. Computational Linguistics, 19(2), 263–311.Ceska, Z., Toman, M., & Jezek, K. (2008). Multilingual plagiarism detection. In AIMSA’08: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on artificial intelligence (pp. 83–92). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.Clough, P. (2003). Old and new challenges in automatic plagiarism detection. National UK Plagiarism Advisory Service, http://www.ir.shef.ac.uk/cloughie/papers/pas_plagiarism.pdf .Dempster A. P., Laird N. M., Rubin D. B. (1977). Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM algorithm. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological), 39(1), 1–38.Dumais, S. T., Letsche, T. A., Littman, M. L., & Landauer, T. K. (1997). Automatic cross-language retrieval using latent semantic indexing. In D. Hull & D. Oard (Eds.), AAAI-97 spring symposium series: Cross-language text and speech retrieval (pp. 18–24). Stanford University, American Association for Artificial Intelligence.Gabrilovich, E., & Markovitch, S. (2007). Computing semantic relatedness using Wikipedia-based explicit semantic analysis. In Proceedings of the 20th international joint conference for artificial intelligence, Hyderabad, India.Hoad T. C., & Zobel, J. (2003). Methods for identifying versioned and plagiarised documents. American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(3), 203–215.Levow, G.-A., Oard, D. W., & Resnik, P. (2005). Dictionary-based techniques for cross-language information retrieval. Information Processing & Management, 41(3), 523–547.Littman, M., Dumais, S. T., & Landauer, T. K. (1998). Automatic cross-language information retrieval using latent semantic indexing. In Cross-language information retrieval, chap. 5 (pp. 51–62). Kluwer.Maurer, H., Kappe, F., & Zaka, B. (2006). Plagiarism—a survey. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 12(8), 1050–1084.McCabe, D. (2005). Research report of the Center for Academic Integrity. http://www.academicintegrity.org .Mcnamee, P., & Mayfield, J. (2004). Character N-gram tokenization for European language text retrieval. Information Retrieval, 7(1–2), 73–97.Meyer zu Eissen, S., & Stein, B. (2006). Intrinsic plagiarism detection. In M. Lalmas, A. MacFarlane, S. M. Rüger, A. Tombros, T. Tsikrika, & A. Yavlinsky (Eds.), Proceedings of the European conference on information retrieval (ECIR 2006), volume 3936 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 565–569). Springer.Meyer zu Eissen, S., Stein, B., & Kulig, M. (2007). Plagiarism detection without reference collections. In R. Decker & H. J. Lenz (Eds.), Advances in data analysis (pp. 359–366), Springer.Och, F. J., & Ney, H. (2003). A systematic comparison of various statistical alignment models. Computational Linguistics, 29(1), 19–51.Pinto, D., Juan, A., & Rosso, P. (2007). Using query-relevant documents pairs for cross-lingual information retrieval. In V. Matousek & P. Mautner (Eds.), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (pp. 630–637). Pilsen, Czech Republic.Pinto, D., Civera, J., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Juan, A., & Rosso, P. (2009). A statistical approach to cross-lingual natural language tasks. Journal of Algorithms, 64(1), 51–60.Potthast, M. (2007). Wikipedia in the pocket-indexing technology for near-duplicate detection and high similarity search. In C. Clarke, N. Fuhr, N. Kando, W. Kraaij, & A. de Vries (Eds.), 30th Annual international ACM SIGIR conference (pp. 909–909). ACM.Potthast, M., Stein, B., & Anderka, M. (2008). A Wikipedia-based multilingual retrieval model. In C. Macdonald, I. Ounis, V. Plachouras, I. Ruthven, & R. W. White (Eds.), 30th European conference on IR research, ECIR 2008, Glasgow , volume 4956 LNCS of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 522–530). Berlin: Springer.Pouliquen, B., Steinberger, R., & Ignat, C. (2003a). Automatic annotation of multilingual text collections with a conceptual thesaurus. In Proceedings of the workshop ’ontologies and information extraction’ at the Summer School ’The Semantic Web and Language Technology—its potential and practicalities’ (EUROLAN’2003) (pp. 9–28), Bucharest, Romania.Pouliquen, B., Steinberger, R., & Ignat, C. (2003b). Automatic identification of document translations in large multilingual document collections. In Proceedings of the international conference recent advances in natural language processing (RANLP’2003) (pp. 401–408). Borovets, Bulgaria.Stein, B. (2007). Principles of hash-based text retrieval. In C. Clarke, N. Fuhr, N. Kando, W. Kraaij, & A. de Vries (Eds.), 30th Annual international ACM SIGIR conference (pp. 527–534). ACM.Stein, B. (2005). Fuzzy-fingerprints for text-based information retrieval. In K. Tochtermann & H. Maurer (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th international conference on knowledge management (I-KNOW 05), Graz, Journal of Universal Computer Science. (pp. 572–579). Know-Center.Stein, B., & Anderka, M. (2009). Collection-relative representations: A unifying view to retrieval models. In A. M. Tjoa & R. R. Wagner (Eds.), 20th International conference on database and expert systems applications (DEXA 09) (pp. 383–387). IEEE.Stein, B., & Meyer zu Eissen, S. (2007). Intrinsic plagiarism analysis with meta learning. In B. Stein, M. Koppel, & E. Stamatatos (Eds.), SIGIR workshop on plagiarism analysis, authorship identification, and near-duplicate detection (PAN 07) (pp. 45–50). CEUR-WS.org.Stein, B., & Potthast, M. (2007). Construction of compact retrieval models. In S. Dominich & F. Kiss (Eds.), Studies in theory of information retrieval (pp. 85–93). Foundation for Information Society.Stein, B., Meyer zu Eissen, S., & Potthast, M. (2007). Strategies for retrieving plagiarized documents. In C. Clarke, N. Fuhr, N. Kando, W. Kraaij, & A. de Vries (Eds.), 30th Annual international ACM SIGIR conference (pp. 825–826). ACM.Steinberger, R., Pouliquen, B., Widiger, A., Ignat, C., Erjavec, T., Tufis, D., & Varga, D. (2006). The JRC-Acquis: A multilingual aligned parallel corpus with 20+ languages. In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC’2006).Steinberger, R., Pouliquen, B., & Ignat, C. (2004). Exploiting multilingual nomenclatures and language-independent text features as an interlingua for cross-lingual text analysis applications. In Proceedings of the 4th Slovenian language technology conference. Information Society 2004 (IS’2004).Vinokourov, A., Shawe-Taylor, J., & Cristianini, N. (2003). Inferring a semantic representation of text via cross-language correlation analysis. In S. Becker, S. Thrun, & K. Obermayer (Eds.), NIPS-02: Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 1473–1480). MIT Press.Yang, Y., Carbonell, J. G., Brown, R. D., & Frederking, R. E. (1998). Translingual information retrieval: Learning from bilingual corpora. Artificial Intelligence, 103(1–2), 323–345

Plagiarism meets paraphrasing: insights for the next generation in automatic plagiarism detection

[EN] Although paraphrasing is the linguistic mechanism underlying many plagiarism cases, little attention has been paid to its analysis in the framework of automatic plagiarism detection. Therefore, state-of-the-art plagiarism detectors find it difficult to detect cases of paraphrase plagiarism. In this article, we analyze the relationship between paraphrasing and plagiarism, paying special attention to which paraphrase phenomena underlie acts of plagiarism and which of them are detected by plagiarism detection systems. With this aim in mind, we created the P4P corpus, a new resource that uses a paraphrase typology to annotate a subset of the PAN-PC-10 corpus for automatic plagiarism detection. The results of the Second International Competition on Plagiarism Detection were analyzed in the light of this annotation.The presented experiments show that (i) more complex paraphrase phenomena and a high density of paraphrase mechanisms make plagiarism detection more difficult, (ii) lexical substitutions are the paraphrase mechanisms used the most when plagiarizing, and (iii) paraphrase mechanisms tend to shorten the plagiarized text. For the first time, the paraphrase mechanisms behind plagiarism have been analyzed, providing critical insights for the improvement of automatic plagiarism detection systems.We would like to thank the people who participated in the annotation of the P4P corpus, Horacio Rodriguez for his helpful advice as experienced researcher, and the reviewers of this contribution for their valuable comments to improve this article. This research work was partially carried out during the tenure of an ERCIM "Alain Bensoussan" Fellowship Programme. The research leading to these results received funding from the EU FP7 Programme 2007-2013 (grant no. 246016), the MICINN projects TEXT-ENTERPRISE 2.0 and TEXT-KNOWLEDGE 2.0 (TIN2009-13391), the EC WIQ-EI IRSES project (grant no. 269180), and the FP7 Marie Curie People Programme. The research work of A. Barron-Cedeno and M. Vila was financed by the CONACyT-Mexico 192021 grant and the MECD-Spain FPU AP2008-02185 grant, respectively. The research work of A. Barron-Cedeno was partially done in the framework of his Ph.D. at the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.Barrón Cedeño, LA.; Vila, M.; Martí, MA.; Rosso, P. (2013). Plagiarism meets paraphrasing: insights for the next generation in automatic plagiarism detection. Computational Linguistics. 39(4):917-947. https://doi.org/10.1162/COLI_a_00153S917947394Barzilay, Regina. 2003. Information Fusion for Multidocument Summarization: Paraphrasing and Generation. Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, New York.Barzilay, R., & Lee, L. (2003). Learning to paraphrase. Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Human Language Technology - NAACL ’03. doi:10.3115/1073445.1073448Barzilay, Regina and Kathleen R. McKeown. 2001. Extracting paraphrases from a parallel corpus. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2001), pages 50–57, Toulouse.Barzilay, R., McKeown, K. R., & Elhadad, M. (1999). Information fusion in the context of multi-document summarization. Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Computational Linguistics -. doi:10.3115/1034678.1034760Bhagat, Rahul. 2009. Learning Paraphrases from Text. Ph.D. thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.Cheung, Mei Ling Lisa. 2009. Merging Corpus Linguistics and Collaborative Knowledge Construction. Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, Birmingham.Cohn, T., Callison-Burch, C., & Lapata, M. (2008). Constructing Corpora for the Development and Evaluation of Paraphrase Systems. Computational Linguistics, 34(4), 597-614. doi:10.1162/coli.08-003-r1-07-044Dras, Mark. 1999. Tree Adjoining Grammar and the Reluctant Paraphrasing of Text. Ph.D. thesis, Macquarie University, Sydney.Faigley, L., & Witte, S. (1981). Analyzing Revision. College Composition and Communication, 32(4), 400. doi:10.2307/356602Fujita, Atsushi. 2005. Automatic Generation of Syntactically Well-formed and Semantically Appropriate Paraphrases. Ph.D. thesis, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara.Grozea, C., & Popescu, M. (2010). Who’s the Thief? Automatic Detection of the Direction of Plagiarism. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 700-710. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-12116-6_59GÜLICH, E. (2003). Conversational Techniques Used in Transferring Knowledge between Medical Experts and Non-experts. Discourse Studies, 5(2), 235-263. doi:10.1177/1461445603005002005Harris, Z. S. (1957). Co-Occurrence and Transformation in Linguistic Structure. Language, 33(3), 283. doi:10.2307/411155KETCHEN Jr., D. J., & SHOOK, C. L. (1996). THE APPLICATION OF CLUSTER ANALYSIS IN STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT RESEARCH: AN ANALYSIS AND CRITIQUE. Strategic Management Journal, 17(6), 441-458. doi:10.1002/(sici)1097-0266(199606)17:63.0.co;2-gMcCarthy, D., & Navigli, R. (2009). The English lexical substitution task. Language Resources and Evaluation, 43(2), 139-159. doi:10.1007/s10579-009-9084-1Recasens, M., & Vila, M. (2010). On Paraphrase and Coreference. Computational Linguistics, 36(4), 639-647. doi:10.1162/coli_a_00014Shimohata, Mitsuo. 2004. Acquiring Paraphrases from Corpora and Its Application to Machine Translation. Ph.D. thesis, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara.Stein, B., Potthast, M., Rosso, P., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stamatatos, E., & Koppel, M. (2011). Fourth international workshop on uncovering plagiarism, authorship, and social software misuse. ACM SIGIR Forum, 45(1), 45. doi:10.1145/1988852.198886

EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020

Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV, http://www.aisv.it)

On the treatment of singularities in the multigrid method

SIGLECopy held by FIZ Karlsruhe; available from UB/TIB Hannover / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman

Leveraging online user feedback to improve statistical machine translation

In this article we present a three-step methodology for dynamically improving a statistical machine translation (SMT) system by incorporating human feedback in the form of free edits on the system translations. We target at feedback provided by casual users, which is typically error-prone. Thus, we first propose a filtering step to automatically identify the better user-edited translations and discard the useless ones. A second step produces a pivot-based alignment between source and user-edited sentences, focusing on the errors made by the system. Finally, a third step produces a new translation model and combines it linearly with the one from the original system. We perform a thorough evaluation on a real-world dataset collected from the Reverso.net translation service and show that every step in our methodology contributes significantly to improve a general purpose SMT system. Interestingly, the quality improvement is not only due to the increase of lexical coverage, but to a better lexical selection, reordering, and morphology. Finally, we show the robustness of the methodology by applying it to a different scenario, in which the new examples come from an automatically Web-crawled parallel corpus. Using exactly the same architecture and models provides again a significant improvement of the translation quality of a general purpose baseline SMT system.Peer Reviewe