A Challenge Set Approach to Evaluating Machine Translation

Neural machine translation represents an exciting leap forward in translation quality. But what longstanding weaknesses does it resolve, and which remain? We address these questions with a challenge set approach to translation evaluation and error analysis. A challenge set consists of a small set of sentences, each hand-designed to probe a system's capacity to bridge a particular structural divergence between languages. To exemplify this approach, we present an English-French challenge set, and use it to analyze phrase-based and neural systems. The resulting analysis provides not only a more fine-grained picture of the strengths of neural systems, but also insight into which linguistic phenomena remain out of reach.Comment: EMNLP 2017. 28 pages, including appendix. Machine readable data included in a separate file. This version corrects typos in the challenge se

Discrete embeddings for Lagrangian and Hamiltonian systems

The general topic of the present paper is to study the conservation for some structural property of a given problem when discretising this problem. Precisely we are interested with Lagrangian or Hamiltonian structures and thus with variational problems attached to a least action principle. Considering a partial differential equation (PDE) deriving from such a variational principle, a natural question is to know whether this structure at the continuous level is preserved at the discrete level when discretising the PDE. To address this question a concept of \textit{coherence} is introduced. Both the differential equation (the PDE translating the least action principle) and the variational structure can be embedded at the discrete level. This provides two discrete embeddings for the original problem. In case these procedures finally provide the same discrete problem we will say that the discretisation is \textit{coherent}. Our purpose is illustrated with the Poisson problem. Coherence for discrete embeddings of Lagrangian structures is studied for various classical discretisations (finite elements, finite differences and finite volumes). Hamiltonian structures are shown to provide coherence between a discrete Hamiltonian structure and the discretisation of the mixed formulation of the PDE, both for mixed finite elements and mimetic finite differences methods.Comment: Acta Mathematica Vietnamica, Springer Singapore, A Para{\^i}tr

Raviart-Thomas finite elements of Petrov-Galerkin type

The mixed finite element method for the Poisson problem with the Raviart-Thomas elements of low-level can be interpreted as a finite volume method with a non-local gradient. In this contribution, we propose a variant of Petrov-Galerkin type for this problem to ensure a local computation of the gradient at the interfaces of the elements. The shape functions are the Raviart-Thomas finite elements. Our goal is to define test functions that are in duality with these shape functions: Precisely, the shape and test functions will be asked to satisfy a L2-orthogonality property. The general theory of Babu\v{s}ka brings necessary and sufficient stability conditions for a Petrov-Galerkin mixed problem to be convergent. We propose specific constraints for the dual test functions in order to ensure stability. With this choice, we prove that the mixed Petrov-Galerkin scheme is identical to the four point finite volumes scheme of Herbin, and to the mass lumping approach developed by Baranger, Maitre and Oudin. Finally, we construct a family of dual test functions that satisfy the stability conditions. Convergence is proven with the usual techniques of mixed finite elements

On the uniqueness of the solution of the two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation with a Dirac mass as initial vorticity

We propose two different proofs of the fact that Oseen's vortex is the unique solution of the two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation with a Dirac mass as initial vorticity. The first argument, due to C.E. Wayne and the second author, is based on an entropy estimate for the vorticity equation in self-similar variables. The second proof is new and relies on symmetrization techniques for parabolic equations.Comment: 9 pages, no figur

Towards an Automatic Dictation System for Translators: the TransTalk Project

Professional translators often dictate their translations orally and have them typed afterwards. The TransTalk project aims at automating the second part of this process. Its originality as a dictation system lies in the fact that both the acoustic signal produced by the translator and the source text under translation are made available to the system. Probable translations of the source text can be predicted and these predictions used to help the speech recognition system in its lexical choices. We present the results of the first prototype, which show a marked improvement in the performance of the speech recognition task when translation predictions are taken into account.Comment: Published in proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) 94. 4 pages, uuencoded compressed latex source with 4 postscript figure