GREAT: open source software for statistical machine translation

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10590-011-9097-6[EN] In this article, the first public release of GREAT as an open-source, statistical machine translation (SMT) software toolkit is described. GREAT is based on a bilingual language modelling approach for SMT, which is so far implemented for n-gram models based on the framework of stochastic finite-state transducers. The use of finite-state models is motivated by their simplicity, their versatility, and the fact that they present a lower computational cost, if compared with other more expressive models. Moreover, if translation is assumed to be a subsequential process, finite-state models are enough for modelling the existing relations between a source and a target language. GREAT includes some characteristics usually present in state-of-the-art SMT, such as phrase-based translation models or a log-linear framework for local features. Experimental results on a well-known corpus such as Europarl are reported in order to validate this software. A competitive translation quality is achieved, yet using both a lower number of model parameters and a lower response time than the widely-used, state-of-the-art SMT system Moses. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.Study was supported by the EC (FEDER, FSE), the Spanish government (MICINN, MITyC, “Plan E”, under Grants MIPRCV “Consolider Ingenio 2010”, iTrans2 TIN2009-14511, and erudito.com TSI-020110-2009-439), and the Generalitat Valenciana (Grant Prometeo/2009/014).González Mollá, J.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2011). GREAT: open source software for statistical machine translation. Machine Translation. 25(2):145-160. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-011-9097-6S145160252Amengual JC, Benedí JM, Casacuberta F, Castaño MA, Castellanos A, Jiménez VM, Llorens D, Marzal A, Pastor M, Prat F, Vidal E, Vilar JM (2000) The EUTRANS-I speech translation system. 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PhD thesis, Universitat Politècnica de València. Advisor: Casacuberta FGonzález J, Casacuberta F (2009) GREAT: a finite-state machine translation toolkit implementing a grammatical inference approach for transducer inference (GIATI). In: Proceedings of the EACL Workshop on Computational Linguistic Aspects of Grammatical Inference, Athens, Greece, pp 24–32Kanthak S, Vilar D, Matusov E, Zens R, Ney H (2005) Novel reordering approaches in phrase-based statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts: Data-Driven Machine Translation and Beyond, Ann Arbor, MI, pp 167–174Karttunen L (2001) Applications of finite-state transducers in natural language processing. In: Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata, London, UK, pp 34–46Kneser R, Ney H (1995) Improved backing-off for n-gram language modeling. 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Neural Models for Measuring Confidence on Interactive Machine Translation Systems

[EN] Reducing the human effort performed with the use of interactive-predictive neural machine translation (IPNMT) systems is one of the main goals in this sub-field of machine translation (MT). Prior works have focused on changing the human¿machine interaction method and simplifying the feedback performed. Applying confidence measures (CM) to an IPNMT system helps decrease the number of words that the user has to check through the translation session, reducing the human effort needed, although this supposes losing a few points in the quality of the translations. The effort reduction comes from decreasing the number of words that the translator has to review¿it only has to check the ones with a score lower than the threshold set. In this paper, we studied the performance of four confidence measures based on the most used metrics on MT. We trained four recurrent neural network (RNN) models to approximate the scores from the metrics: Bleu, Meteor, Chr-f, and TER. In the experiments, we simulated the user interaction with the system to obtain and compare the quality of the translations generated with the effort reduction. We also compare the performance of the four models between them to see which of them obtains the best results. The results achieved showed a reduction of 48% with a Bleu score of 70 points¿a significant effort reduction to translations almost perfect.This work received funds from the Comunitat Valenciana under project EU-FEDER (ID-IFEDER/2018/025), Generalitat Valenciana under project ALMAMATER (PrometeoII/2014/030), and Ministerio de Ciencia e Investigacion/Agencia Estatal de Investigacion/10.13039/501100011033/and "FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa" under project MIRANDA-DocTIUM (RTI2018-095645-B-C22).Navarro-Martínez, Á.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2022). Neural Models for Measuring Confidence on Interactive Machine Translation Systems. Applied Sciences. 12(3):1-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/app1203110011612

Online Learning for Effort Reduction in Interactive Neural Machine Translation

[EN] Neural machine translation systems require large amounts of training data and resources. Even with this, the quality of the translations may be insufficient for some users or domains. In such cases, the output of the system must be revised by a human agent. This can be done in a post-editing stage or following an interactive machine translation protocol. We explore the incremental update of neural machine translation systems during the post-editing or interactive translation processes. Such modifications aim to incorporate the new knowledge, from the edited sentences, into the translation system. Updates to the model are performed on-the-fly, as sentences are corrected, via online learning techniques. In addition, we implement a novel interactive, adaptive system, able to react to single-character interactions. This system greatly reduces the human effort required for obtaining high-quality translations. In order to stress our proposals, we conduct exhaustive experiments varying the amount and type of data available for training. Results show that online learning effectively achieves the objective of reducing the human effort required during the post-editing or the interactive machine translation stages. Moreover, these adaptive systems also perform well in scenarios with scarce resources. We show that a neural machine translation system can be rapidly adapted to a specific domain, exclusively by means of online learning techniques.The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable criticisms and suggestions. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEOII/2014/030 and from TIN2015-70924-C2-1-R. We also acknowledge NVIDIA Corporation for the donation of GPUs used in this work.Peris-Abril, Á.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2019). Online Learning for Effort Reduction in Interactive Neural Machine Translation. Computer Speech & Language. 58:98-126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2019.04.001S981265

NMT-Keras: a Very Flexible Toolkit with a Focus on Interactive NMT and Online Learning

[EN] We present NMT-Keras, a flexible toolkit for training deep learning models, which puts a particular emphasis on the development of advanced applications of neural machine translation systems, such as interactive-predictive translation protocols and long-term adaptation of the translation system via continuous learning. NMT-Keras is based on an extended version of the popular Keras library, and it runs on Theano and TensorFlow. State-of-the-art neural machine translation models are deployed and used following the high-level framework provided by Keras. Given its high modularity and flexibility, it also has been extended to tackle different problems, such as image and video captioning, sentence classification and visual question answering.Much of our Keras fork and the Multimodal Keras Wrapper libraries were developed together with Marc Bolaños. We also acknowledge the rest of contributors to these open-source projects. The research leading this work received funding from grants PROMETEO/2018/004 and CoMUN-HaT - TIN2015-70924-C2-1-R. We finally acknowledge NVIDIA Corporation for the donation of GPUs used in this work.Peris-Abril, Á.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2018). NMT-Keras: a Very Flexible Toolkit with a Focus on Interactive NMT and Online Learning. The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics. 111:113-124. https://doi.org/10.2478/pralin-2018-0010S11312411

Active learning for interactive machine translation

Translation needs have greatly increased during the last years. In many situations, text to be translated constitutes an unbounded stream of data that grows continually with time. An effective approach to translate text documents is to follow an interactive-predictive paradigm in which both the system is guided by the user and the user is assisted by the system to generate error-free translations. Unfortunately, when processing such unbounded data streams even this approach requires an overwhelming amount of manpower. Is in this scenario where the use of active learning techniques is compelling. In this work, we propose different active learning techniques for interactive machine translation. Results show that for a given translation quality the use of active learning allows us to greatly reduce the human effort required to translate the sentences in the stream.González Rubio, J.; Ortiz Martínez, D.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2012). Active learning for interactive machine translation. En Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics. 245-254. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1639524525

Segment-based interactive-predictive machine translation

[EN] Machine translation systems require human revision to obtain high-quality translations. Interactive methods provide an efficient human¿computer collaboration, notably increasing productivity. Recently, new interactive protocols have been proposed, seeking for a more effective user interaction with the system. In this work, we present one of these new protocols, which allows the user to validate all correct word sequences in a translation hypothesis. Thus, the left-to-right barrier from most of the existing protocols is broken. We compare this protocol against the classical prefix-based approach, obtaining a significant reduction of the user effort in a simulated environment. Additionally, we experiment with the use of confidence measures to select the word the user should correct at each iteration, reaching the conclusion that the order in which words are corrected does not affect the overall effort.The research leading to these results has received funding from the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (MINECO) under Project CoMUN-HaT (Grant Agreement TIN2015-70924-C2-1-R), and Generalitat Valenciana under Project ALMAMATER (Ggrant Agreement PROMETEOII/2014/030).Domingo-Ballester, M.; Peris-Abril, Á.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2017). Segment-based interactive-predictive machine translation. Machine Translation. 31(4):163-185. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-017-9213-3S163185314Alabau V, Bonk R, Buck C, Carl M, Casacuberta F, García-Martínez M, González-Rubio J, Koehn P, Leiva LA, Mesa-Lao B, Ortiz-Martínez D, Saint-Amand H, Sanchis-Trilles G, Tsoukala C (2013) CASMACAT: an open source workbench for advanced computer aided translation. 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Log-Linear Weight Optimization Using Discriminative Ridge Regression Method in Statistical Machine Translation

[EN] We present a simple and reliable method for estimating the log-linear weights of a state-of-the-art machine translation system, which takes advantage of the method known as discriminative ridge regression (DRR). Since inappropriate weight estimations lead to a wide variability of translation quality results, reaching a reliable estimate for such weights is critical for machine translation research. For this reason, a variety of methods have been proposed to reach reasonable estimates. In this paper, we present an algorithmic description and empirical results proving that DRR, as applied in a pseudo-batch scenario, is able to provide comparable translation quality when compared to state-of-the-art estimation methods (i.e., MERT [1] and MIRA [2]). Moreover, the empirical results reported are coherent across different corpora and language pairs.The research leading to these results has received funding fromthe Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEOII/2014/030 and the FPI (2014) grant by Universitat Politècnica de València.Chinea-Ríos, M.; Sanchis Trilles, G.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2017). Log-Linear Weight Optimization Using Discriminative Ridge Regression Method in Statistical Machine Translation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 10255:32-41. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-58838-4_4S324110255Och, F.J.: Minimum error rate training in statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of ACL, pp. 160–167 (2003)Crammer, K., Dekel, O., Keshet, J., Shalev-Shwartz, S., Singer, Y.: Online passive-aggressive algorithms. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 7, 551–585 (2006)Och, F.J., Ney, H.: A systematic comparison of various statistical alignment models. Comput. Linguist. 29, 19–51 (2003)Koehn, P.: Statistical Machine Translation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2010)Martínez-Gómez, P., Sanchis-Trilles, G., Casacuberta, F.: Online adaptation strategies for statistical machine translation in post-editing scenarios. Pattern Recogn. 45(9), 3193–3203 (2012)Cherry, C., Foster, G.: Batch tuning strategies for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of NAACL, pp. 427–436 (2012)Sanchis-Trilles, G., Casacuberta, F.: Log-linear weight optimisation via Bayesian adaptation in statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of ACL, pp. 1077–1085 (2010)Marie, B., Max, A.: Multi-pass decoding with complex feature guidance for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of ACL, pp. 554–559 (2015)Hopkins, M., May, J.: Tuning as ranking. In: Proceedings of EMNLP, pp. 1352–1362 (2011)Stauffer, C., Grimson, W.E.L.: Learning patterns of activity using real-time tracking. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 22(8), 747–757 (2000)Koehn, P., Hoang, H., Birch, A., Callison-Burch, C., Federico, M., Bertoldi, N., Cowan, B., Shen, W., Moran, C., Zens, R., Dyer, C., Bojar, O., Constantin, A., Herbst, E.: Moses: open source toolkit for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of ACL, pp. 177–180 (2007)Kneser, R., Ney, H.: Improved backing-off for m-gram language modeling. In: Proceedings of ICASSP, pp. 181–184 (1995)Stolcke, A.: Srilm-an extensible language modeling toolkit. In: Proceedings of ICSLP, pp. 901–904 (2002)Papineni, K., Roukos, S., Ward, T., Zhu, W.-J.: BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. In: Proceedings of ACL, pp. 311–318 (2002)Chen, B., Cherry, C.: A systematic comparison of smoothing techniques for sentence-level BLEU. In: Proceedings of WMT, pp. 362–367 (2014)Snover, M., Dorr, B.J., Schwartz, R., Micciulla, L., Makhoul, J.: A study of translation edit rate with targeted human annotation. In: Proceedings of AMTA, pp. 223–231 (2006)Tiedemann, J.: News from opus-a collection of multilingual parallel corpora with tools and interfaces. In: Proceedings of RANLP, pp. 237–248 (2009)Tiedemann, J.: Parallel data, tools and interfaces in opus. In: Proceedings of LREC, pp. 2214–2218 (2012

Discriminative ridge regression algorithm for adaptation in statistical machine translation

[EN] We present a simple and reliable method for estimating the log-linear weights of a state-of-the-art machine translation system, which takes advantage of the method known as discriminative ridge regression (DRR). Since inappropriate weight estimations lead to a wide variability of translation quality results, reaching a reliable estimate for such weights is critical for machine translation research. For this reason, a variety of methods have been proposed to reach reasonable estimates. In this paper, we present an algorithmic description and empirical results proving that DRR is able to provide comparable translation quality when compared to state-of-the-art estimation methods [i.e. MERT and MIRA], with a reduction in computational cost. Moreover, the empirical results reported are coherent across different corpora and language pairs.The research leading to these results were partially supported by projects CoMUN-HaT-TIN2015-70924-C2-1-R (MINECO/FEDER) and PROMETEO/2018/004. We also acknowledge NVIDIA for the donation of a GPU used in this work.Chinea-Ríos, M.; Sanchis-Trilles, G.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2019). Discriminative ridge regression algorithm for adaptation in statistical machine translation. Pattern Analysis and Applications. 22(4):1293-1305. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-018-0720-5S12931305224Barrachina S, Bender O, Casacuberta F, Civera J, Cubel E, Khadivi S, Lagarda A, Ney H, Tomás J, Vidal E et al (2009) Statistical approaches to computer-assisted translation. Comput Ling 35(1):3–28Bojar O, Buck C, Federmann C, Haddow B, Koehn P, Monz C, Post M, Specia L (eds) (2014) Proceedings of the ninth workshop on statistical machine translation. Association for Computational LinguisticsBrown PF, Pietra VJD, Pietra SAD, Mercer RL (1993) The mathematics of statistical machine translation: parameter estimation. 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Domain adaptation problem in statistical machine translation systems

Globalization suddenly brings many people from different country to interact with each other, requiring them to be able to speak several languages. Human translators are slow and expensive, we find the necessity of developing machine translators to automatize the task. Several approaches of Machine translation have been develop by the researchers. In this work, we use the Statistical Machine Translation approach. Statistical Machine Translation systems perform poorly when applied on new domains. The domain adaptation problem has recently gained interest in Statistical Machine Translation. The basic idea is to improve the performance of the system trained and tuned with different domain than the one to be translated. This article studies different paradigms of domain adaptation. The results report improvements compared with a system trained only with in-domain data and trained with all the available data.Chinea Ríos, M.; Sanchis Trilles, G.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2015). Domain adaptation problem in statistical machine translation systems. En Artificial Intelligence Research and Development. IOS Press. 205-213. doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-578-4-205S20521