Modeling Target-Side Inflection in Neural Machine Translation

NMT systems have problems with large vocabulary sizes. Byte-pair encoding (BPE) is a popular approach to solving this problem, but while BPE allows the system to generate any target-side word, it does not enable effective generalization over the rich vocabulary in morphologically rich languages with strong inflectional phenomena. We introduce a simple approach to overcome this problem by training a system to produce the lemma of a word and its morphologically rich POS tag, which is then followed by a deterministic generation step. We apply this strategy for English-Czech and English-German translation scenarios, obtaining improvements in both settings. We furthermore show that the improvement is not due to only adding explicit morphological information.Comment: Accepted as a research paper at WMT17. (Updated version with corrected references.

Experiments in morphosyntactic processing for translating to and from German

We describe two shared task systems and associated experiments. The German to English system used reordering rules ap-plied to parses and morphological split-ting and stemming. The English to Ger-man system used an additional translation step which recreated compound words and generated morphological inflection

For the Sake of Consistency: Distinguishing Combatant Terrorists from Non-combatant Terrorists in Modern Warfare

This article aims to offer a solution for prosecuting terrorists consistently and efficiently in the ever-expanding world of modern warfare. It argues that our country\u27s approach to prosecuting terrorists has been wildly inconsistent, and that clarity and consistency are required moving forward. The executive branch, which directs the path the Department of Justice and military take in these arenas, has been the main instigator of the inconsistency. The decision whether to prosecute foreign, non-citizen terrorists in an Article III federal court or military tribunal/commission has become politicized, allowing political winds to dictate policy, albeit an inconsistent, unprincipled one. The Bush administration sought to prosecute terrorists in military commissions. Conversely, Barack Obama prefers Article III federal courts where procedure and due process are more prevalent. These inconsistent approaches, which have been more criticized than applauded, provided a band-aid approach for a bullet hole wound that is our country\u27s recent, and potentially future, approach to the prosecution of terrorists. This paper argues for a common sense, two-pronged approach. First, treat combatant terrorists as combatant Prisoners of War, prosecuting them in military commissions while treating non-combatant, domestic terrorists as such and prosecute them in Article III federal courts under domestic criminal law. Second, modernize the law of war so that it is applicable to the extremely different and constantly evolving realities of combat and war in the world today

Target-Side Context for Discriminative Models in Statistical Machine Translation

Discriminative translation models utilizing source context have been shown to help statistical machine translation performance. We propose a novel extension of this work using target context information. Surprisingly, we show that this model can be efficiently integrated directly in the decoding process. Our approach scales to large training data sizes and results in consistent improvements in translation quality on four language pairs. We also provide an analysis comparing the strengths of the baseline source-context model with our extended source-context and target-context model and we show that our extension allows us to better capture morphological coherence. Our work is freely available as part of Moses.Comment: Accepted as a long paper for ACL 201

X-ray extinction in piezo electric crystals

The extent to which x-ray extinction occurs in a crystal is determined by the perfection of the crystal. Those wavelengths which could be reflected by the lattice in a perfect crystal are extinguished by multiple reflections, resulting in a high absorption coefficient for the crystal. The imperfection of the surface decreases the possible number of these multiple reflections, thereby increasing the energy going to form the Laue patterns;Piezo electric oscillation of quartz, Rochelle salt and tourmaline crystals brings about as increase in the intensity of the Laue pattern formed by the reflection of x-rays passing the crystals. This effect is very noticeable for quartz, but it is not so pronounced in Rochelle salt and tourmaline. The oscillation of the crystal reduces the perfection of the lattice so that extinction is reduced and more energy passes through the crystal in both the secondary beams and the primary beam;Etching the surfaces of the crystal plates decreases their reflecting power for x-rays but also increases the strength of oscillation of the crystal. The effect on quartz is very pronounced, the effect of etching is overshadowed by the increased strength of oscillation, which results in a more intense pattern than for the non-oscillating crystal. The increased strength of oscillation distorts to a greater extent the structure of the crystal so that less of the energy is removed from the primary beam by reflection, and also increases enormously the efficiency of reflection