Moses-based official baseline for NEWS 2016

Transliteration is the phonetic translation between two different languages. There are many works that approach transliteration using machine translation methods. This paper describes the official baseline system for the NEWS 2016 workshop shared task. This baseline is based on a standard phrase-based machine translation system using Moses. Results are between the range of best and worst from last year’s workshops providing a nice starting point for participants this year.Postprint (published version

Ongoing study for enhancing chinese-spanish translation with morphology strategies

Chinese and Spanish have different morphology structures, which poses a big challenge for translating between this pair of languages. In this paper, we analyze several strategies to better generalize from the Chinese non-morphology-based language to the Spanish rich morphologybased language. Strategies use a first-step of Spanish morphology-based simplifications and a second-step of fullform generation. The latter can be done using a translation system or classification methods. Finally, both steps are combined either by concatenation in cascade or integration using a factored-based style. Ongoing experiments (based on the United Nations corpus) and their results are described.Postprint (published version

How much hybridisation does machine translation need?

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: [Costa-jussà, M. R. (2015), How much hybridization does machine translation Need?. J Assn Inf Sci Tec, 66: 2160–2165. doi:10.1002/asi.23517], which has been published in final form at [10.1002/asi.23517]. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.Rule-based and corpus-based machine translation (MT)have coexisted for more than 20 years. Recently, bound-aries between the two paradigms have narrowed andhybrid approaches are gaining interest from bothacademia and businesses. However, since hybridapproaches involve the multidisciplinary interaction oflinguists, computer scientists, engineers, and informa-tion specialists, understandably a number of issuesexist.While statistical methods currently dominate researchwork in MT, most commercial MT systems are techni-cally hybrid systems. The research community shouldinvestigate the bene¿ts and questions surrounding thehybridization of MT systems more actively. This paperdiscusses various issues related to hybrid MT includingits origins, architectures, achievements, and frustra-tions experienced in the community. It can be said thatboth rule-based and corpus- based MT systems havebene¿ted from hybridization when effectively integrated.In fact, many of the current rule/corpus-based MTapproaches are already hybridized since they do includestatistics/rules at some point.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Why Catalan-Spanish Neural Machine Translation? Analysis, comparison and combination with standard Rule and Phrase-based technologies

Catalan and Spanish are two related languages given that both derive from Latin. They share similarities in several linguistic levels including morphology, syntax and semantics. This makes them particularly interesting for the MT task. Given the recent appearance and popularity of neural MT, this paper analyzes the performance of this new approach compared to the well-established rule-based and phrase-based MT systems. Experiments are reported on a large database of 180 million words. Results, in terms of standard automatic measures, show that neural MT clearly outperforms the rule-based and phrase-based MT system on in-domain test set, but it is worst in the out-of-domain test set. A naive system combination specially works for the latter. In-domain manual analysis shows that neural MT tends to improve both adequacy and fluency, for example, by being able to generate more natural translations instead of literal ones, choosing to the adequate target word when the source word has several translations and improving gender agreement. However, out-of-domain manual analysis shows how neural MT is more affected by unknown words or contexts.Postprint (published version

Domain adaptation strategies in statistical machine translation: a brief overview

© Cambridge University Press, 2015.Statistical machine translation (SMT) is gaining interest given that it can easily be adapted to any pair of languages. One of the main challenges in SMT is domain adaptation because the performance in translation drops when testing conditions deviate from training conditions. Many research works are arising to face this challenge. Research is focused on trying to exploit all kinds of material, if available. This paper provides an overview of research, which copes with the domain adaptation challenge in SMT.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Description of the Chinese-to-Spanish rule-based machine translation system developed with a hybrid combination of human annotation and statistical techniques

Two of the most popular Machine Translation (MT) paradigms are rule based (RBMT) and corpus based, which include the statistical systems (SMT). When scarce parallel corpus is available, RBMT becomes particularly attractive. This is the case of the Chinese--Spanish language pair. This article presents the first RBMT system for Chinese to Spanish. We describe a hybrid method for constructing this system taking advantage of available resources such as parallel corpora that are used to extract dictionaries and lexical and structural transfer rules. The final system is freely available online and open source. Although performance lags behind standard SMT systems for an in-domain test set, the results show that the RBMT’s coverage is competitive and it outperforms the SMT system in an out-of-domain test set. This RBMT system is available to the general public, it can be further enhanced, and it opens up the possibility of creating future hybrid MT systems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

WMT 2016 Multimodal translation system description based on bidirectional recurrent neural networks with double-embeddings

Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks (BiRNNs) have shown outstanding results on sequence-to-sequence learning tasks. This architecture becomes specially interesting for multimodal machine translation task, since BiRNNs can deal with images and text. On most translation systems the same word embedding is fed to both BiRNN units. In this paper, we present several experiments to enhance a baseline sequence-to-sequence system (Elliott et al., 2015), for example, by using double embeddings. These embeddings are trained on the forward and backward direction of the input sequence. Our system is trained, validated and tested on the Multi30K dataset (Elliott et al., 2016) in the context of theWMT 2016Multimodal Translation Task. The obtained results show that thedouble-embedding approach performs significantly better than the traditional single-embedding one.Postprint (published version

Estudio preliminar de la aplicación de varias técnicas de comunicación en diseños circulares

Comunicació presentada al 23rd International Congress on Project Management and Engineering (Málaga, 10-12 July 2019).An effective Circular Economy strategy comprises demonstrate practical application, by including real life examples and emphasizing with data and facts. The communication strategy is addressed during the design process and designers have to think about the product/service and about how communicating it. To reach a broader impact, techniques like creative storytelling or educational messages are needed. This work aims to know the ease or difficulty for industrial design engineering students in the application of these techniques to effectively communicate the advantages of a design based in the Circular Economy. To address this, a workshop has been done to explain basic notions about circular economy and consumptions patterns and trends. Then, communication techniques were explained, using examples. The workshop proceeded asking the students to apply these techniques for emphasizing the advantages of a circular product, working in groups. Finally, a questionnaire was passed to evaluate their opinion about the communication techniques applied. At the end, a debate was conducted about their perception about the importance of communication in designs based in circular economy.Una estrategia de Economía Circular efectiva requiere mostrar aplicación práctica, incluyendo ejemplos de la vida real y enfatizando con datos y hechos. La estrategia de comunicación se aborda durante el proceso de diseño y los diseñadores deben pensar en el producto/servicio y en cómo comunicarlo. Para conseguir un mayor impacto, es necesaria la aplicación de técnicas como narración creativa de historias o los mensajes educativos. Este trabajo pretende conocer la facilidad o dificultad que tienen estudiantes de ingeniería en diseño industrial en aplicar estas técnicas para comunicar de forma efectiva las ventajas de un diseño basado en la economía circular. Para ello, se ha programado un taller en el que se introdujo la economía circular y los patrones de consumo y tendencias de mercado relacionados con ésta. Después se les explicaron las técnicas de comunicación, mostrando un ejemplo. A continuación, se les ha pedido que apliquen, trabajando en grupo, cada técnica de comunicación para enfatizar las ventajas de un producto circular. Finalmente, se les pasó un cuestionario de evaluación sobre su opinión acerca de las técnicas de comunicación aplicadas. También se debatió sobre su percepción en cuanto a la importancia de la comunicación en diseños basados en la economía circular

Enhancing scarce-resource language translation through pivot combinations

Chinese and Spanish are the most spoken languages in the world. However, there is not much research done in machine translation for this language pair. We experiment with the parallel Chinese-Spanish corpus (United Nations) to explore alternatives of SMT strategies which consist on using a pivot language. Particularly, two well-known alternatives are shown for pivoting: the cascade system and the pseudo-corpus. As Pivot language we use English, Arabic and French. Results show that English is the best pivot language between Chinese and Spanish. As a new strategy, we propose to perform a combination of the pivot strategies which is capable to highly outperform the direct translation strategy.Postprint (published version

La comunicación como herramienta básica de enfermería

La comunicación es un elemento básico en las relaciones humanas. En enfermería es muy importante saber qué decir, cuándo decirlo y cómo hacerlo. El arte del cuidado enfermero se desarrolla mediante el establecimiento de una adecuada relación terapéutica y ésta solo se consigue mediante la escucha activa y el diálogo. Además, la profesión enfermera dedica una gran parte de su trabajo diario en el trato de “tú a tú” con el paciente y su entorno y para ello es imprescindible saber comunicar.Grado en Enfermerí