Analyzing Subword Techniques to Improve English to Sinhala Neural Machine Translation

Author(s):  
Rashmini Naranpanawa ◽  
Ravinga Perera ◽  
Thilakshi Fonseka ◽  
Uthayasanker Thayasivam

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a remarkable approach which performs much better than the Statistical machine translation (SMT) models when there is an abundance of parallel corpus. However, vanilla NMT is primarily based upon word-level with a fixed vocabulary. Therefore, low resource morphologically rich languages such as Sinhala are mostly affected by the out of vocabulary (OOV) and Rare word problems. Recent advancements in subword techniques have opened up opportunities for low resource communities by enabling open vocabulary translation. In this paper, we extend our recently published state-of-the-art EN-SI translation system using the transformer and explore standard subword techniques on top of it to identify which subword approach has a greater effect on English Sinhala language pair. Our models demonstrate that subword segmentation strategies along with the state-of-the-art NMT can perform remarkably when translating English sentences into a rich morphology language regardless of a large parallel corpus.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Sukanta Sen ◽  
Mohammed Hasanuzzaman ◽  
Asif Ekbal ◽  
Pushpak Bhattacharyya ◽  
Andy Way

Abstract Neural machine translation (NMT) has recently shown promising results on publicly available benchmark datasets and is being rapidly adopted in various production systems. However, it requires high-quality large-scale parallel corpus, and it is not always possible to have sufficiently large corpus as it requires time, money, and professionals. Hence, many existing large-scale parallel corpus are limited to the specific languages and domains. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to improve an NMT system in low-resource scenario without using any additional data. Our approach aims at augmenting the original training data by means of parallel phrases extracted from the original training data itself using a statistical machine translation (SMT) system. Our proposed approach is based on the gated recurrent unit (GRU) and transformer networks. We choose the Hindi–English, Hindi–Bengali datasets for Health, Tourism, and Judicial (only for Hindi–English) domains. We train our NMT models for 10 translation directions, each using only 5–23k parallel sentences. Experiments show the improvements in the range of 1.38–15.36 BiLingual Evaluation Understudy points over the baseline systems. Experiments show that transformer models perform better than GRU models in low-resource scenarios. In addition to that, we also find that our proposed method outperforms SMT—which is known to work better than the neural models in low-resource scenarios—for some translation directions. In order to further show the effectiveness of our proposed model, we also employ our approach to another interesting NMT task, for example, old-to-modern English translation, using a tiny parallel corpus of only 2.7K sentences. For this task, we use publicly available old-modern English text which is approximately 1000 years old. Evaluation for this task shows significant improvement over the baseline NMT.


Digital ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-102
Author(s):  
Akshai Ramesh ◽  
Venkatesh Balavadhani Parthasarathy ◽  
Rejwanul Haque ◽  
Andy Way

Phrase-based statistical machine translation (PB-SMT) has been the dominant paradigm in machine translation (MT) research for more than two decades. Deep neural MT models have been producing state-of-the-art performance across many translation tasks for four to five years. To put it another way, neural MT (NMT) took the place of PB-SMT a few years back and currently represents the state-of-the-art in MT research. Translation to or from under-resourced languages has been historically seen as a challenging task. Despite producing state-of-the-art results in many translation tasks, NMT still poses many problems such as performing poorly for many low-resource language pairs mainly because of its learning task’s data-demanding nature. MT researchers have been trying to address this problem via various techniques, e.g., exploiting source- and/or target-side monolingual data for training, augmenting bilingual training data, and transfer learning. Despite some success, none of the present-day benchmarks have entirely overcome the problem of translation in low-resource scenarios for many languages. In this work, we investigate the performance of PB-SMT and NMT on two rarely tested under-resourced language pairs, English-to-Tamil and Hindi-to-Tamil, taking a specialised data domain into consideration. This paper demonstrates our findings and presents results showing the rankings of our MT systems produced via a social media-based human evaluation scheme.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 690
Author(s):  
Kamal Deep ◽  
Ajit Kumar ◽  
Vishal Goyal

This paper describes the creation process and statistics of Punjabi English (PunEng) parallel corpus. Parallel corpus is the main requirement to develop statistical machine translation as well as neural machine translation. Until now, we do not have any availability of PunEng parallel corpus. In this paper, we have shown difficulties and intensive labor to develop parallel corpus. Methods used for collecting data and the results are discussed, errors during the process of collecting data and how to handle these errors will be described.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-49
Author(s):  
Avinash Singh ◽  
Asmeet Kour ◽  
Shubhnandan S. Jamwal

The objective behind this paper is to analyze the English-Dogri parallel corpus translation. Machine translation is the translation from one language into another language. Machine translation is the biggest application of the Natural Language Processing (NLP). Moses is statistical machine translation system allow to train translation models for any language pair. We have developed translation system using Statistical based approach which helps in translating English to Dogri and vice versa. The parallel corpus consists of 98,973 sentences. The system gives accuracy of 80% in translating English to Dogri and the system gives accuracy of 87% in translating Dogri to English system.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 51-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Wolk ◽  
Krzysztof P. Marasek

The quality of machine translation is rapidly evolving. Today one can find several machine translation systems on the web that provide reasonable translations, although the systems are not perfect. In some specific domains, the quality may decrease. A recently proposed approach to this domain is neural machine translation. It aims at building a jointly-tuned single neural network that maximizes translation performance, a very different approach from traditional statistical machine translation. Recently proposed neural machine translation models often belong to the encoder-decoder family in which a source sentence is encoded into a fixed length vector that is, in turn, decoded to generate a translation. The present research examines the effects of different training methods on a Polish-English Machine Translation system used for medical data. The European Medicines Agency parallel text corpus was used as the basis for training of neural and statistical network-based translation systems. A comparison and implementation of a medical translator is the main focus of our experiments.


Author(s):  
Mehreen Alam ◽  
Sibt ul Hussain

Attention-based encoder-decoder models have superseded conventional techniques due to their unmatched performance on many neural machine translation problems. Usually, the encoders and decoders are two recurrent neural networks where the decoder is directed to focus on relevant parts of the source language using attention mechanism. This data-driven approach leads to generic and scalable solutions with no reliance on manual hand-crafted features. To the best of our knowledge, none of the modern machine translation approaches has been applied to address the research problem of Urdu machine transliteration. Ours is the first attempt to apply the deep neural network-based encoder-decoder using attention mechanism to address the aforementioned problem using Roman-Urdu and Urdu parallel corpus. To this end, we present (i) the first ever Roman-Urdu to Urdu parallel corpus of 1.1 million sentences, (ii) three state of the art encoder-decoder models, and (iii) a detailed empirical analysis of these three models on the Roman-Urdu to Urdu parallel corpus. Overall, attention-based model gives state-of-the-art performance with the benchmark of 70 BLEU score. Our qualitative experimental evaluation shows that our models generate coherent transliterations which are grammatically and logically correct.


2005 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dragos Stefan Munteanu ◽  
Daniel Marcu

We present a novel method for discovering parallel sentences in comparable, non-parallel corpora. We train a maximum entropy classifier that, given a pair of sentences, can reliably determine whether or not they are translations of each other. Using this approach, we extract parallel data from large Chinese, Arabic, and English non-parallel newspaper corpora. We evaluate the quality of the extracted data by showing that it improves the performance of a state-of-the-art statistical machine translation system. We also show that a good-quality MT system can be built from scratch by starting with a very small parallel corpus (100,000 words) and exploiting a large non-parallel corpus. Thus, our method can be applied with great benefit to language pairs for which only scarce resources are available.


2022 ◽  
Vol 2022 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Syed Abdul Basit Andrabi ◽  
Abdul Wahid

Machine translation is an ongoing field of research from the last decades. The main aim of machine translation is to remove the language barrier. Earlier research in this field started with the direct word-to-word replacement of source language by the target language. Later on, with the advancement in computer and communication technology, there was a paradigm shift to data-driven models like statistical and neural machine translation approaches. In this paper, we have used a neural network-based deep learning technique for English to Urdu languages. Parallel corpus sizes of around 30923 sentences are used. The corpus contains sentences from English-Urdu parallel corpus, news, and sentences which are frequently used in day-to-day life. The corpus contains 542810 English tokens and 540924 Urdu tokens, and the proposed system is trained and tested using 70 : 30 criteria. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed system, several automatic evaluation metrics are used, and the model output is also compared with the output from Google Translator. The proposed model has an average BLEU score of 45.83.


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