Some Contributions to Interactive Machine Translation and to the Applications of Machine Translation for Historical Documents

[ES] Los documentos históricos son una parte importante de nuestra herencia cultural. Sin embargo, debido a la barrera idiomática inherente en el lenguaje humano y a las propiedades lingüísticas de estos documentos, su accesibilidad está principalmente restringida a los académicos. Por un lado, el lenguaje humano evoluciona con el paso del tiempo. Por otro lado, las convenciones ortográficas no se crearon hasta hace poco y, por tanto, la ortografía cambia según el período temporal y el autor. Por estas razones, el trabajo de los académicos es necesario para que los no expertos puedan obtener una comprensión básica de un documento determinado. En esta tesis abordamos dos tareas relacionadas con el procesamiento de documentos históricos. La primera tarea es la modernización del lenguaje que, a fin de hacer que los documentos históricos estén más accesibles para los no expertos, tiene como objetivo reescribir un documento utilizando la versión moderna del idioma original del documento. La segunda tarea es la normalización ortográfica. Las propiedades lingüísticas de los documentos históricos mencionadas con anterioridad suponen un desafío adicional para la aplicación efectiva del procesado del lenguaje natural en estos documentos. Por lo tanto, esta tarea tiene como objetivo adaptar la ortografía de un documento a los estándares modernos a fin de lograr una consistencia ortográfica. Ambas tareas las afrontamos desde una perspectiva de traducción automática, considerando el idioma original de un documento como el idioma fuente, y su homólogo moderno/normalizado como el idioma objetivo. Proponemos varios enfoques basados en la traducción automática estadística y neuronal, y llevamos a cabo una amplia experimentación que ratifica el potencial de nuestras contribuciones -en donde los enfoques estadísticos arrojan resultados iguales o mejores que los enfoques neuronales para la mayoría de los casos-. En el caso de la tarea de modernización del lenguaje, esta experimentación incluye una evaluación humana realizada con la ayuda de académicos y un estudio con usuarios que verifica que nuestras propuestas pueden ayudar a los no expertos a obtener una comprensión básica de un documento histórico sin la intervención de un académico. Como ocurre con cualquier problema de traducción automática, nuestras aplicaciones no están libres de errores. Por lo tanto, para obtener modernizaciones/normalizaciones perfectas, un académico debe supervisar y corregir los errores. Este es un procedimiento común en la industria de la traducción. La metodología de traducción automática interactiva tiene como objetivo reducir el esfuerzo necesario para obtener traducciones de alta calidad uniendo al agente humano y al sistema de traducción en un proceso de corrección cooperativo. Sin embargo,la mayoría de los protocolos interactivos siguen una estrategia de izquierda a derecha. En esta tesis desarrollamos un nuevo protocolo interactivo que rompe con esta barrera de izquierda a derecha. Hemos evaluado este nuevo protocolo en un entorno de traducción automática, obteniendo grandes reducciones del esfuerzo humano. Finalmente, dado que este marco interactivo es de aplicación general a cualquier problema de traducción, lo hemos aplicado -nuestro nuevo protocolo junto con uno de los protocolos clásicos de izquierda a derecha- a la modernización del lenguaje y a la normalización ortográfica. Al igual que en traducción automática, el marco interactivo logra disminuir el esfuerzo requerido para corregir los resultados de un sistema automático.[CA] Els documents històrics són una part important de la nostra herència cultural. No obstant això, degut a la barrera idiomàtica inherent en el llenguatge humà i a les propietats lingüístiques d'aquests documents, la seua accessibilitat està principalment restringida als acadèmics. D'una banda, el llenguatge humà evoluciona amb el pas del temps. D'altra banda, les convencions ortogràfiques no es van crear fins fa poc i, per tant, l'ortografia canvia segons el període temporal i l'autor. Per aquestes raons, el treball dels acadèmics és necessari perquè els no experts puguen obtindre una comprensió bàsica d'un document determinat. En aquesta tesi abordem dues tasques relacionades amb el processament de documents històrics. La primera tasca és la modernització del llenguatge que, a fi de fer que els documents històrics estiguen més accessibles per als no experts, té per objectiu reescriure un document utilitzant la versió moderna de l'idioma original del document. La segona tasca és la normalització ortogràfica. Les propietats lingüístiques dels documents històrics mencionades amb anterioritat suposen un desafiament addicional per a l'aplicació efectiva del processat del llenguatge natural en aquests documents. Per tant, aquesta tasca té per objectiu adaptar l'ortografia d'un document als estàndards moderns a fi d'aconseguir una consistència ortogràfica. Dues tasques les afrontem des d'una perspectiva de traducció automàtica, considerant l'idioma original d'un document com a l'idioma font, i el seu homòleg modern/normalitzat com a l'idioma objectiu. Proposem diversos enfocaments basats en la traducció automàtica estadística i neuronal, i portem a terme una àmplia experimentació que ratifica el potencial de les nostres contribucions -on els enfocaments estadístics obtenen resultats iguals o millors que els enfocaments neuronals per a la majoria dels casos-. En el cas de la tasca de modernització del llenguatge, aquesta experimentació inclou una avaluació humana realitzada amb l'ajuda d'acadèmics i un estudi amb usuaris que verifica que les nostres propostes poden ajudar als no experts a obtindre una comprensió bàsica d'un document històric sense la intervenció d'un acadèmic. Com ocurreix amb qualsevol problema de traducció automàtica, les nostres aplicacions no estan lliures d'errades. Per tant, per obtindre modernitzacions/normalitzacions perfectes, un acadèmic ha de supervisar i corregir les errades. Aquest és un procediment comú en la indústria de la traducció. La metodologia de traducció automàtica interactiva té per objectiu reduir l'esforç necessari per obtindre traduccions d'alta qualitat unint a l'agent humà i al sistema de traducció en un procés de correcció cooperatiu. Tot i això, la majoria dels protocols interactius segueixen una estratègia d'esquerra a dreta. En aquesta tesi desenvolupem un nou protocol interactiu que trenca amb aquesta barrera d'esquerra a dreta. Hem avaluat aquest nou protocol en un entorn de traducció automàtica, obtenint grans reduccions de l'esforç humà. Finalment, atès que aquest marc interactiu és d'aplicació general a qualsevol problema de traducció, l'hem aplicat -el nostre nou protocol junt amb un dels protocols clàssics d'esquerra a dreta- a la modernització del llenguatge i a la normalitzaciò ortogràfica. De la mateixa manera que en traducció automàtica, el marc interactiu aconsegueix disminuir l'esforç requerit per corregir els resultats d'un sistema automàtic.[EN] Historical documents are an important part of our cultural heritage. However,due to the language barrier inherent in human language and the linguistic properties of these documents, their accessibility is mostly limited to scholars. On the one hand, human language evolves with the passage of time. On the other hand, spelling conventions were not created until recently and, thus, orthography changes depending on the time period and author. For these reasons, the work of scholars is needed for non-experts to gain a basic understanding of a given document. In this thesis, we tackle two tasks related with the processing of historical documents. The first task is language modernization which, in order to make historical documents more accessible to non-experts, aims to rewrite a document using the modern version of the document's original language. The second task is spelling normalization. The aforementioned linguistic properties of historical documents suppose an additional challenge for the effective natural language processing of these documents. Thus, this task aims to adapt a document's spelling to modern standards in order to achieve an orthography consistency. We affront both task from a machine translation perspective, considering a document's original language as the source language, and its modern/normalized counterpart as the target language. We propose several approaches based on statistical and neural machine translation, and carry out a wide experimentation that shows the potential of our contributions¿with the statistical approaches yielding equal or better results than the neural approaches in most of the cases. For the language modernization task, this experimentation includes a human evaluation conducted with the help of scholars and a user study that verifies that our proposals are able to help non-experts to gain a basic understanding of a historical document without the intervention of a scholar. As with any machine translation problem, our applications are not error-free. Thus, to obtain perfect modernizations/normalizations, a scholar needs to supervise and correct the errors. This is a common procedure in the translation industry. The interactive machine translation framework aims to reduce the effort needed for obtaining high quality translations by embedding the human agent and the translation system into a cooperative correction process. However, most interactive protocols follow a left-to-right strategy. In this thesis, we developed a new interactive protocol that breaks this left-to-right barrier. We evaluated this new protocol in a machine translation environment, obtaining large reductions of the human effort. Finally, since this interactive framework is of general application to any translation problem, we applied it¿our new protocol together with one of the classic left-to-right protocols¿to language modernization and spelling normalization. As with machine translation, the interactive framework diminished the effort required for correcting the outputs of an automatic system.The research leading to this thesis has been partially funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) under projects SmartWays (grant agreement RTC-2014-1466-4), CoMUN-HaT (grant agreement TIN2015-70924-C2-1-R) and MISMISFAKEnHATE (grant agreement PGC2018-096212-B-C31); Generalitat Valenciana under projects ALMAMATER (grant agreement PROMETEOII/2014/030) and DeepPattern (grant agreement PROMETEO/2019/121); the European Union through Programa Operativo del Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) from Comunitat Valenciana (2014–2020) under project Sistemas de frabricación inteligentes para la indústria 4.0 (grant agreement ID-IFEDER/2018/025); and the PRHLT research center under the research line Machine Learning Applications.Domingo Ballester, M. (2022). Some Contributions to Interactive Machine Translation and to the Applications of Machine Translation for Historical Documents [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/181231TESI

Reconocedor automático de melodías de música clásica

Todos hemos escuchado alguna vez una melodía y nos hemos quedado con la duda de saber el título de la canción a la que pertenece. Existen aplicaciones como Shazam capaces de solucionar este problema. Sin embargo, estas no funcionan tan bien cuando nos encontramos dentro del ámbito de la música clásica. El objetivo de este proyecto es, partiendo de una base de datos de tamaño moderado compuesta por canciones pertenecientes a la música clásica, estudiar las técnicas de análisis, formas de proceso y modelos de señal más apropiadas para ser capaz de reconocer una canción de la base de datos a partir de: un fragmento de la canción, parte de su melodía, un tarareo de la misma, un silbido de su melodía, o cantando (en caso de que la canción posea letra).Domingo Ballester, M. (2014). Reconocedor automático de melodías de música clásica. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/45907.Archivo delegad

Interactive post-editing in machine translation

[EN] The current state of the art in Machine Translation (MT) is far from being good enough, with a post-process carried out by a human agent being necessary in many cases in order to correct translations. Statistical post-editing of a MT system has been used in the past to improve the translation quality of that system. Additionally, research on interactive translation prediction has been done with the aim of reducing the human post-editing effort. In this thesis, a new methodology that combines both techniques is proposed in order to, given a MT system, increase the translation quality of that system and reduce the effort that the human agent needs to make in order to correct the translation of that system. This methodology is tested on different scenarios (to connect with the output of a rulebased machine translation system, and as a method to adapt an statistical MT system from one domain to another) with different corpora, obtaining very encouraging results[ES] El estado actual del arte en traducción automática (Machine Translation, MT) todavía no es lo suficientemente bueno, siendo en muchos casos necesario un post-proceso llevado a cabo por un agente humano a fin de corregir las traducciones. La post-edición estadística de un sistema de MT se ha utilizado en el pasado para mejorar la calidad de traducción de dicho sistema. Además, se han llevado a cabo investigaciones en traducción mediante predicción interactiva con el objetivo de reducir el esfuerzo humano de post-edición. En esta tesis se propone una nueva metodología que combina ambas técnicas a fin de, dado un sistema de MT, incrementar la calidad de traducción de dicho sistema y reducir el esfuerzo que el agente humano ha de hacer a la hora de corregir las traducciones de dicho sistema. Esta metodología ha sido probada en diferentes escenarios (para conectar la salida de un sistema de traducción basado en reglas, y como método para adaptar un sistema de MT estadístico de un dominio a otro) con diferentes córpora, obteniendo resultados muy esperanzadores.Domingo Ballester, M. (2015). Interactive post-editing in machine translation. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/6425

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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In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations. arXiv:1409.0473Barrachina S, Bender O, Casacuberta F, Civera J, Cubel E, Khadivi S, Lagarda A, Ney H, Tomás J, Vidal E, Vilar J-M (2009) Statistical approaches to computer-assisted translation. Comput Linguist 35:3–28Brown PF, Pietra VJD, Pietra SAD, Mercer RL (1993) The mathematics of statistical machine translation: parameter estimation. Comput Linguist 19(2):263–311Chen SF, Goodman J (1996) An empirical study of smoothing techniques for language modeling. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, pp 310–318Cheng S, Huang S, Chen H, Dai X, Chen J (2016) PRIMT: a pick-revise framework for interactive machine translation. In: Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp 1240–1249Dale R (2016) How to make money in the translation business. 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Interactive neural machine translation

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Computer Speech & Language. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Computer Speech & Language 00 (2016) 1 20. DOI 10.1016/j.csl.2016.12.003.Despite the promising results achieved in last years by statistical machine translation, and more precisely, by the neural machine translation systems, this technology is still not error-free. The outputs of a machine translation system must be corrected by a human agent in a post-editing phase. Interactive protocols foster a human computer collaboration, in order to increase productivity. In this work, we integrate the neural machine translation into the interactive machine translation framework. Moreover, we propose new interactivity protocols, in order to provide the user an enhanced experience and a higher productivity. Results obtained over a simulated benchmark show that interactive neural systems can significantly improve the classical phrase-based approach in an interactive-predictive machine translation scenario. c 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and in-depth criticisms and suggestions. This work was partially funded by the project ALMAMATER (PrometeoII/2014/030). We also acknowledge NVIDIA for the donation of the GPU used in this work.Peris Abril, Á.; Domingo-Ballester, M.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2017). Interactive neural machine translation. Computer Speech and Language. 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2016.12.003S12

Modernizing historical documents: A user Study

[EN] Accessibility to historical documents is mostly limited to scholars. This is due to the language barrier inherent in human language and the linguistic properties of these documents. Given a historical document, modernization aims to generate a new version of it, written in the modern version of the document's language. Its goal is to tackle the language barrier, decreasing the comprehension difficulty and making historical documents accessible to a broader audience. In this work, we proposed a new neural machine translation approach that profits from modern documents to enrich its systems. We tested this approach with both automatic and human evaluation, and conducted a user study. Results showed that modernization is successfully reaching its goal, although it still has room for improvement.The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and in-depth criticisms and suggestions. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union through Programa Operativo del Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) from Comunitat Valenciana (2014-2020) under project Sistemas de frabricacion inteligentes para la industria 4.0 (grant agreement IDIFEDER/2018/025); from Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (MINECO) under project MISMIS-FAKEnHATE (grant agreement PGC2018-096212-B-C31); from Fundacion BBVA under project Carabela (grant agreement CARABELA); and from Generalitat Valenciana (GVA) under project DeepPattern (grant agreement PROMETEO/2019/121). We gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of a GPU used for part of this research, and Andres Trapiello and Ediciones Destino for granting us permission to use their book in our research. Additionally, we would like to thank all the volunteers that took part in the user study, and the scholars from Prolope that took part in the human evaluation.Domingo-Ballester, M.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2020). Modernizing historical documents: A user Study. Pattern Recognition Letters. 133:151-157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2020.02.027S15115713

Global Pain State Questionnaire: Reliability, Validity, and Gender Gap

Objective: To quantify patients’ pain more objectively is essential to guide an individualized therapy, all the more so in patients under long-term opioid-use. Only a thoughtful and objective understanding of risks and benefits could improve an individualized standard of care. Our aim was to assess metric reliability and validity of an integrated and self-report Global Pain Status questionnaire to quantify the impact of pain on patient’s health in a more precise manner. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted to analyse the reliability, agreement, and validity of an integrated questionnaire compared to isolated scales, due to kappa statistics, intra- class and other correlation coefficients. Level of pain (intensity and relief), quality of life, most prevalent analgesic adverse events and hospital frequentation were registered in a total of 38 cases (pain unit patients) and 52 painless matched-controls.. A reduced multitrait-multimethod matrix and a canonical-correlation analysis were developed together with a multiple linear regression. Results: Cases (56 ± 10 years old, 63% females, pain intensity 66 ± 23 mm, incidence rate of 5 adverse events) represented a regular pain population. A high intraobserver correlation (r0.75- 0.88, weighted-κ 0.41–0.51, unweighted-κ 0.66-0.82) was evidenced together with significant correlation coefficients in test-retest reliability, and for validity, even more, in a reduced multitrait-multimethod matrix (>0.8) and canonical-correlation (>0.95). A gender gap was evidenced in cases’ companions, mostly middle-aged females (78%), who experienced negative effects on their health. Conclusions: The Global Pain Status questionnaire is an evaluation instrument with enough reliability and validity, being a low-cost method to determine the multidimensional pain management at clinical routine. A gender-gap within pain caregivers was found that affect their health outcomes. Support interventions for pain patients’ companions should consider specific gender risk factors

Demonstration of a Neural Machine Translation System with Online Learning for Translators

[EN] We introduce a demonstration of our system, which implements online learning for neural machine translation in a production environment. These techniques allow the system to continuously learn from the corrections provided by the translators. We implemented an end-to-end platform integrating our machine translation servers to one of the most common user interfaces for professional translators: SDL Trados Studio. Our objective was to save post-editing effort as the machine is continuously learning from human choices and adapting the models to a specific domain or user style.The research leading to these results has received funding from the Spanish Centre for Technological and Industrial Development (Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnologico Industrial) (CDTI) and ¿ the European Union through Programa Operativo de Crecimiento Inteligente (Project IDI20170964). We gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of a GPU used for part of this research.Domingo-Ballester, M.; García-Martínez, M.; Estela, A.; Bié, L.; Helle, A.; Peris, Á.; Casacuberta Nolla, F.... (2019). Demonstration of a Neural Machine Translation System with Online Learning for Translators. Association for Computational Linguistics. 70-74. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/180931S707

Learning non-linear patch embeddings with neural networks for label fusion

In brain structural segmentation, multi-atlas strategies are increasingly being used over single-atlas strategies because of their ability to fit a wider anatomical variability. Patch-based label fusion (PBLF) is a type of such multi-atlas approaches that labels each target point as a weighted combination of neighboring atlas labels, where atlas points with higher local similarity to the target contribute more strongly to label fusion. PBLF can be potentially improved by increasing the discriminative capabilities of the local image similarity measurements. We propose a framework to compute patch embeddings using neural networks so as to increase discriminative abilities of similarity-based weighted voting in PBLF. As particular cases, our framework includes embeddings with different complexities, namely, a simple scaling, an affine transformation, and non-linear transformations. We compare our method with state-of-the-art alternatives in whole hippocampus and hippocampal subfields segmentation experiments using publicly available datasets. Results show that even the simplest versions of our method outperform standard PBLF, thus evidencing the benefits of discriminative learning. More complex transformation models tended to achieve better results than simpler ones, obtaining a considerable increase in average Dice score compared to standard PBLF.he first author is co-financed by the Marie Curie FP7-PEOPLE-2012-COFUND Action, Grant agreement no: 600387. This work is partly supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Maria de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502). Part of the data used for this project was funded by the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) (National Institutes of Health Grant U01 AG024904) and DOD ADNI (Department of Defense award number W81XWH-12-2-0012)

Nonlinear interaction between APOE ε4 allele load and age in the hippocampal surface of cognitively intact individuals

The ε4 allele of the gene Apolipoprotein E is the major genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's Disease. APOE ε4 has been associated with changes in brain structure in cognitively impaired and unimpaired subjects, including atrophy of the hippocampus, which is one of the brain structures that is early affected by AD. In this work we analyzed the impact of APOE ε4 gene dose and its association with age, on hippocampal shape assessed with multivariate surface analysis, in a ε4‐enriched cohort of n = 479 cognitively healthy individuals. Furthermore, we sought to replicate our findings on an independent dataset of n = 969 individuals covering the entire AD spectrum. We segmented the hippocampus of the subjects with a multi‐atlas‐based approach, obtaining high‐dimensional meshes that can be analyzed in a multivariate way. We analyzed the effects of different factors including APOE, sex, and age (in both cohorts) as well as clinical diagnosis on the local 3D hippocampal surface changes. We found specific regions on the hippocampal surface where the effect is modulated by significant APOE ε4 linear and quadratic interactions with age. We compared between APOE and diagnosis effects from both cohorts, finding similarities between APOE ε4 and AD effects on specific regions, and suggesting that age may modulate the effect of APOE ε4 and AD in a similar way.“la Caixa” Foundation, Grant/Award Number: LCF/PR/GN17/50300004; Ministry of Business and Knowledge of the Catalan Government, Grant/Award Number: 2017‐SGR‐892; Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Grant/Award Number: MDM‐2015‐0502; Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Grant/Award Number: RYC‐2013‐1305