On the effective deployment of current machine translation technology

Machine translation is a fundamental technology that is gaining more importance each day in our multilingual society. Companies and particulars are turning their attention to machine translation since it dramatically cuts down their expenses on translation and interpreting. However, the output of current machine translation systems is still far from the quality of translations generated by human experts. The overall goal of this thesis is to narrow down this quality gap by developing new methodologies and tools that improve the broader and more efficient deployment of machine translation technology. We start by proposing a new technique to improve the quality of the translations generated by fully-automatic machine translation systems. The key insight of our approach is that different translation systems, implementing different approaches and technologies, can exhibit different strengths and limitations. Therefore, a proper combination of the outputs of such different systems has the potential to produce translations of improved quality. We present minimum Bayes¿ risk system combination, an automatic approach that detects the best parts of the candidate translations and combines them to generate a consensus translation that is optimal with respect to a particular performance metric. We thoroughly describe the formalization of our approach as a weighted ensemble of probability distributions and provide efficient algorithms to obtain the optimal consensus translation according to the widespread BLEU score. Empirical results show that the proposed approach is indeed able to generate statistically better translations than the provided candidates. Compared to other state-of-the-art systems combination methods, our approach reports similar performance not requiring any additional data but the candidate translations. Then, we focus our attention on how to improve the utility of automatic translations for the end-user of the system. Since automatic translations are not perfect, a desirable feature of machine translation systems is the ability to predict at run-time the quality of the generated translations. Quality estimation is usually addressed as a regression problem where a quality score is predicted from a set of features that represents the translation. However, although the concept of translation quality is intuitively clear, there is no consensus on which are the features that actually account for it. As a consequence, quality estimation systems for machine translation have to utilize a large number of weak features to predict translation quality. This involves several learning problems related to feature collinearity and ambiguity, and due to the ¿curse¿ of dimensionality. We address these challenges by adopting a two-step training methodology. First, a dimensionality reduction method computes, from the original features, the reduced set of features that better explains translation quality. Then, a prediction model is built from this reduced set to finally predict the quality score. We study various reduction methods previously used in the literature and propose two new ones based on statistical multivariate analysis techniques. More specifically, the proposed dimensionality reduction methods are based on partial least squares regression. The results of a thorough experimentation show that the quality estimation systems estimated following the proposed two-step methodology obtain better prediction accuracy that systems estimated using all the original features. Moreover, one of the proposed dimensionality reduction methods obtained the best prediction accuracy with only a fraction of the original features. This feature reduction ratio is important because it implies a dramatic reduction of the operating times of the quality estimation system. An alternative use of current machine translation systems is to embed them within an interactive editing environment where the system and a human expert collaborate to generate error-free translations. This interactive machine translation approach have shown to reduce supervision effort of the user in comparison to the conventional decoupled post-edition approach. However, interactive machine translation considers the translation system as a passive agent in the interaction process. In other words, the system only suggests translations to the user, who then makes the necessary supervision decisions. As a result, the user is bound to exhaustively supervise every suggested translation. This passive approach ensures error-free translations but it also demands a large amount of supervision effort from the user. Finally, we study different techniques to improve the productivity of current interactive machine translation systems. Specifically, we focus on the development of alternative approaches where the system becomes an active agent in the interaction process. We propose two different active approaches. On the one hand, we describe an active interaction approach where the system informs the user about the reliability of the suggested translations. The hope is that this information may help the user to locate translation errors thus improving the overall translation productivity. We propose different scores to measure translation reliability at the word and sentence levels and study the influence of such information in the productivity of an interactive machine translation system. Empirical results show that the proposed active interaction protocol is able to achieve a large reduction in supervision effort while still generating translations of very high quality. On the other hand, we study an active learning framework for interactive machine translation. In this case, the system is not only able to inform the user of which suggested translations should be supervised, but it is also able to learn from the user-supervised translations to improve its future suggestions. We develop a value-of-information criterion to select which automatic translations undergo user supervision. However, given its high computational complexity, in practice we study different selection strategies that approximate this optimal criterion. Results of a large scale experimentation show that the proposed active learning framework is able to obtain better compromises between the quality of the generated translations and the human effort required to obtain them. Moreover, in comparison to a conventional interactive machine translation system, our proposal obtained translations of twice the quality with the same supervision effort.González Rubio, J. (2014). On the effective deployment of current machine translation technology [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/37888TESI

Planar ESPAR Array Design with Nonsymmetrical Pattern by Means of Finite-Element Method, Domain Decomposition, and Spherical Wave Expansion

The application of a 3D domain decomposition finite-element and spherical mode expansion for the design of planar ESPAR (electronically steerable passive array radiator) made with probe-fed circular microstrip patches is presented in this work. A global generalized scattering matrix (GSM) in terms of spherical modes is obtained analytically from the GSM of the isolated patches by using rotation and translation properties of spherical waves. The whole behaviour of the array is characterized including all the mutual coupling effects between its elements. This procedure has been firstly validated by analyzing an array of monopoles on a ground plane, and then it has been applied to synthesize a prescribed radiation pattern optimizing the reactive loads connected to the feeding ports of the array of circular patches by means of a genetic algorithm

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

Dimensionality reduction methods for machine translation quality estimation

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10590-013-9139-3[EN] Quality estimation (QE) for machine translation is usually addressed as a regression problem where a learning model is used to predict a quality score from a (usually highly-redundant) set of features that represent the translation. This redundancy hinders model learning, and thus penalizes the performance of quality estimation systems. We propose different dimensionality reduction methods based on partial least squares regression to overcome this problem, and compare them against several reduction methods previously used in the QE literature. Moreover, we study how the use of such methods influence the performance of different learning models. Experiments carried out on the English-Spanish WMT12 QE task showed that it is possible to improve prediction accuracy while significantly reducing the size of the feature sets.This work supported by the European Union Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) under the CasMaCat project (grants agreement no. 287576), by Spanish MICINN under TIASA (TIN2009-14205-C04-02) project, and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant ALMPR (Prometeo/2009/014).González Rubio, J.; Navarro Cerdán, JR.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2013). Dimensionality reduction methods for machine translation quality estimation. Machine Translation. 27(3-4):281-301. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-013-9139-3S281301273-4Amaldi E, Kann V (1998) On the approximability of minimizing nonzero variables or unsatisfied relations in linear systems. Theor Comput Sci 209(1–2):237–260Anderson TW (1958) An introduction to multivariate statistical analysis. 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In: Proceedinss of the meeting of the association for computational linguistics, pp 173–177González-Rubio J, Sanchís A, Casacuberta F (2012) Prhlt submission to the wmt12 quality estimation task. In: Proceedings of the seventh workshop on statistical machine translation, pp 104–108Guyon I, Elisseeff A (2003) An introduction to variable and feature selection. Machine Learning Research 3:1157–1182Hall M, Frank E, Holmes G, Pfahringer B, Reutemann P, Witten IH (2009) The WEKA data mining software: an update. SIGKDD Explor Newsl 11(1):10–18Hotelling H (1931) The generalization of Student’s ratio. Ann Math Stat 2(3):360–378Koehn 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 (2007) Moses: open source toolkit for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the association for computational linguistics, demonstration sessionKohavi R, John GH (1997) Wrappers for feature subset selection. 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Effect of the solvent on the conformational behavior of the alanine dipeptide deduced from MD simulations

In general, peptides do not exhibit a well-defined conformational profile in solution. However, despite the experimental blurred picture associated with their structure, compelling spectroscopic evidence shows that peptides exhibit local order. The conformational profile of a peptide is the result of a balance between intramolecular interactions between different atoms of the molecule and intermolecular interactions between atoms of the molecule and the solvent. Accordingly, the conformational profile of a peptide will change upon the properties of the solvent it is soaked. To get insight into the balance between intra- and intermolecular interactions on the conformational preferences of the peptide backbone we have studied the conformational profile of the alanine dipeptide in diverse solvents using molecular dynamics as sampling technique. Solvents studied include chloroform, methanol, dimethyl sulfoxide, water and N-methylacetamide. Different treatments of the solvent have been studied in the present work including explicit solvent molecules, a generalized Born model and using the bulk dielectric constant of the solvent. The diverse calculations identify four major conformations with different populations in the diverse solvents: the C7 eq only sampled in chloroform; the C5 or extended conformation; the polyproline (PII) conformation and the right-handed a-helix conformation (aR). The results of present calculations permit to analyze how the balance between intra- and intermolecular interactions explains the populations of the diverse conformations observed.Postprint (published version

Proyectando el futuro: un estudio sobre toma de decisiones vocacionales desde un enfoque narrativo autobiográfico

El trabajo que presentamos se desarrolla en el marco de la educación secundaria obligatoria y se centra en la perspectiva de seis alumnos y una alumna con dificultades de aprendizaje procedentes de una pequeña población rural española. El diseño incluye algunos aspectos novedosos al combinar estrategias de investigación e intervención basadas en las nociones de mediación y re-mediación socio-cultural. Se asume un doble objetivo analítico y práctico: por un lado, analizar la forma como los estudiantes construyen discursivamente significados identitarios vinculados con la toma de decisiones sobre su futuro; por otro, ofrecer a los orientados herramientas que, a modo de dispositivo re-mediador, faciliten la tarea reflexiva que supone la construcción y proyección de la propia carrera académica y laboral. Se concluye que el uso reflexivo de narrativas autobiográficas permite integrar la orientación vocacional en el contexto social, cultural e institucional en que se produce, logrando así una mayor significatividad e impacto en la vida del orientado.We explore the vocational decisions of seven students with learning challenges living in a rural area in Spain and who were completing their final year of compulsory education. Our design combined research and intervention strategies based on notions of sociocultural mediation and re-mediation. Our objectives were both analytical and practical. On the one hand, a sociocultural approach was used to explore how identity meanings are used by the students on a discursive construction related to their vocational choices; on the other hand, students had been provided with tools that facilitated the reflexive act of constructing and projecting their own academic and professional careers. We conclude that the reflexive use of autobiographical narratives makes it possible to provide vocational guidance in social, cultural, and institutional environments, helping to increase its impact on students' lives.In unserer Studie haben wir uns mit den Berufsentscheidungen von sieben schulpflichtigen Schüler/innen mit Lernschwierigkeiten im letzten Jahr ihres Schulbesuchs in einer ländlichen spanischen Region befasst. Unsere Forschungs- und Interventionsstrategien basierten auf Konzepten der soziokulturellen Mediation und Re-Mediation und waren zugleich analytisch und praxisorientiert: Einerseits sollten mittels eines soziokulturellen Zugangs die Identitätskonzepte verstanden werden, die den diskursiven Konstruktionen der zukünftigen Berufswahl unterlagen. Andererseits gaben wir den Schüler/innen Werkzeuge an die Hand, die die reflexive Konstruktion und Projektion möglicher Berufskarrieren unterstützten. Die reflexive Verwendung solcher autobiografischen Narrative kann wichtige Hilfen für derartige Entscheidungsprozesse in unterschiedlichen sozialen, kulturellen und institutionellen Umgebungen bieten

Sensitivity Study of the Dynamics of Three-Phase Photovoltaic Inverters With an LCL Grid Filter

[EN] An accurate small-signal model of three-phase photovoltaic (PV) inverters with a high-order grid filter is derived in this paper. The proposed model takes into account the influence of both the inverter operating point and the PV panel characteristics on the inverter dynamic response. A sensitivity study of the control loops to variations of the dc voltage, PV panel transconductance, supplied power, and grid inductance is performed using the proposed small-signal model. Analytical and experimental results carried out on a 100-kW PV inverter are presented.Figueres Amorós, E.; Garcerá, G.; Sandia Paredes, J.; González Espín, FJ.; Calvo Rubio, J. (2009). Sensitivity Study of the Dynamics of Three-Phase Photovoltaic Inverters With an LCL Grid Filter. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics. 56(3):706-717. doi:10.1109/TIE.2008.2010175S70671756

Production and marketing characteristics of pig production in the south of the State of Mexico

The paper examines the structure and the operation of pig production in the south of the state of Mexico, it explores the various stages that make up the commercialization process of the activity and the different actors involved, it means, all the process that is followed since the departure of the animal from the farm until its arrival as a final product for the consumer. It is also calculated the marketing margins resulting during the different stages of the process, which are used as indicators of profitability. The study was held in 2007 when a total of 17 producers of pork, two collectors, 28 retailers and 37 consumers of pig meat were polled. The objective of the survey was to gather information about the production process, actors, marketing costs and prices, and then determine the margins of marketing and characterization of pig production in the South of the state of Mexico. The results showed that at current prices, the producers participation in the final price, paid by the consumer, was 26,22 %, while the intermediaries participation was 73,78 %. The total marketing margin averaged 23,93 $/kg, from which retailers gained 23,52$/kg (98,28 %), while the remaining 0,40 $/kg was for the collectors. The traditional marketing process used in the region is: producer, collector, retailer and final consumer

Estrategias pedagógicas para la sana convivencia desde la cátedra de la paz

El presente estudio consistió en diseñar estrategias pedagógicas para la asignatura cátedra de la paz, que fortalezcan la sana convivencia de los estudiantes del grado sexto de la Institución Educativa Integrado Joaquín González Camargo del municipio de Sogamoso Boyacá. La investigación surge desde la necesidad de fomentar la cultura de la paz y la sana convivencia en las aulas de clase, debido a que en el plan curricular y en la metodología dada, se evidencia poco material pedagógico. Esta investigación es de tipo Mixto pues, se utilizaron instrumentos y técnicas cuantitativas y cualitativas de recolección de información como la observación no participante, el cuestionario, la entrevista y aportes de autores que han trabajado sobre el tema. Los instrumentos se aplicaron a 104 estudiantes que corresponden a los estudiantes de grado sexto, cuyas edades oscilan entre 11 y 14 años. Se evidenció que la aplicación de estrategias didácticas, ayudan bastante en la formación, ya que despiertan el interés, mejoran conocimientos en los contenidos poco entendibles y, tienen mayor capacidad y fluidez para expresar lo aprendido

Vision-based techniques for automatic marine plankton classification

Plankton are an important component of life on Earth. Since the 19th century, scientists have attempted to quantify species distributions using many techniques, such as direct counting, sizing, and classification with microscopes. Since then, extraordinary work has been performed regarding the development of plankton imaging systems, producing a massive backlog of images that await classification. Automatic image processing and classification approaches are opening new avenues for avoiding time-consuming manual procedures. While some algorithms have been adapted from many other applications for use with plankton, other exciting techniques have been developed exclusively for this issue. Achieving higher accuracy than that of human taxonomists is not yet possible, but an expeditious analysis is essential for discovering the world beyond plankton. Recent studies have shown the imminent development of real-time, in situ plankton image classification systems, which have only been slowed down by the complex implementations of algorithms on low-power processing hardware. This article compiles the techniques that have been proposed for classifying marine plankton, focusing on automatic methods that utilize image processing, from the beginnings of this field to the present day.Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málaga / CBUA. Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. The authors wish to thank Alonso Hernández-Guerra for his frm support in the development of oceanographic technology. Special thanks to Laia Armengol for her help in the domain of plankton. This study has been funded by Feder of the UE through the RES-COAST Mac-Interreg pro ject (MAC2/3.5b/314). We also acknowledge the European Union projects SUMMER (Grant Agreement 817806) and TRIATLAS (Grant Agreement 817578) from the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme and the Ministry of Science from the Spanish Government through the Project DESAFÍO (PID2020-118118RB-I00)