Source-side Reordering to Improve Machine Translation between Languages with Distinct Word Orders

Author(s):  
Karunesh Kumar Arora ◽  
Shyam Sunder Agrawal

English and Hindi have significantly different word orders. English follows the subject-verb-object (SVO) order, while Hindi primarily follows the subject-object-verb (SOV) order. This difference poses challenges to modeling this pair of languages for translation. In phrase-based translation systems, word reordering is governed by the language model, the phrase table, and reordering models. Reordering in such systems is generally achieved during decoding by transposing words within a defined window. These systems can handle local reorderings, and while some phrase-level reorderings are carried out during the formation of phrases, they are weak in learning long-distance reorderings. To overcome this weakness, researchers have used reordering as a step in pre-processing to render the reordered source sentence closer to the target language in terms of word order. Such approaches focus on using parts-of-speech (POS) tag sequences and reordering the syntax tree by using grammatical rules, or through head finalization. This study shows that mere head finalization is not sufficient for the reordering of sentences in the English-Hindi language pair. It describes various grammatical constructs and presents a comparative evaluation of reorderings with the original and the head-finalized representations. The impact of the reordering on the quality of translation is measured through the BLEU score in phrase-based statistical systems and neural machine translation systems. A significant gain in BLEU score was noted for reorderings in different grammatical constructs.

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sainik Kumar Mahata ◽  
Dipankar Das ◽  
Sivaji Bandyopadhyay

Abstract Machine translation (MT) is the automatic translation of the source language to its target language by a computer system. In the current paper, we propose an approach of using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) over traditional statistical MT (SMT). We compare the performance of the phrase table of SMT to the performance of the proposed RNN and in turn improve the quality of the MT output. This work has been done as a part of the shared task problem provided by the MTIL2017. We have constructed the traditional MT model using Moses toolkit and have additionally enriched the language model using external data sets. Thereafter, we have ranked the phrase tables using an RNN encoder-decoder module created originally as a part of the GroundHog project of LISA lab.


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):  
Carlos Eduardo Silva ◽  
Lincoln Fernandes

This paper describes COPA-TRAD Version 2.0, a parallel corpus-based system developed at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) for translation research, teaching and practice. COPA-TRAD enables the user to investigate the practices of professional translators by identifying translational patterns related to a particular element or linguistic pattern. In addition, the system allows for the comparison between human translation and automatic translation provided by three well-known machine translation systems available on the Internet (Google Translate, Microsoft Translator and Yandex). Currently, COPA-TRAD incorporates five subcorpora (Children's Literature, Literary Texts, Meta-Discourse in Translation, Subtitles and Legal Texts) and provides the following tools: parallel concordancer, monolingual concordancer, wordlist and a DIY Tool that enables the user to create his own parallel disposable corpus. The system also provides a POS-tagging tool interface to analyze and classify the parts of speech of a text.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (34) ◽  
Author(s):  
A.N SAK ◽  
◽  
E.V BESSONOVA ◽  

When constructing machine translation systems, an important task is to represent data using graphs, where words act as vertices, and relations between words in a sentence act as edges. One of these tasks at the first stage of the analysis is the classification of words as parts of speech, and at the next stage of the analysis to determine the belonging of words to the sentence members’ classes. The article discusses methods of parsing both on the basis of rules determined in advance by means of traditional object-oriented programming, and on the basis of analysis by means of graph convolutional neural networks with their subsequent training. Online dictionaries act as a thesaurus.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (12) ◽  
pp. 1478-1487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xabier Soto ◽  
Olatz Perez-de-Viñaspre ◽  
Gorka Labaka ◽  
Maite Oronoz

Abstract Objective To analyze techniques for machine translation of electronic health records (EHRs) between long distance languages, using Basque and Spanish as a reference. We studied distinct configurations of neural machine translation systems and used different methods to overcome the lack of a bilingual corpus of clinical texts or health records in Basque and Spanish. Materials and Methods We trained recurrent neural networks on an out-of-domain corpus with different hyperparameter values. Subsequently, we used the optimal configuration to evaluate machine translation of EHR templates between Basque and Spanish, using manual translations of the Basque templates into Spanish as a standard. We successively added to the training corpus clinical resources, including a Spanish-Basque dictionary derived from resources built for the machine translation of the Spanish edition of SNOMED CT into Basque, artificial sentences in Spanish and Basque derived from frequently occurring relationships in SNOMED CT, and Spanish monolingual EHRs. Apart from calculating bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) values, we tested the performance in the clinical domain by human evaluation. Results We achieved slight improvements from our reference system by tuning some hyperparameters using an out-of-domain bilingual corpus, obtaining 10.67 BLEU points for Basque-to-Spanish clinical domain translation. The inclusion of clinical terminology in Spanish and Basque and the application of the back-translation technique on monolingual EHRs significantly improved the performance, obtaining 21.59 BLEU points. This was confirmed by the human evaluation performed by 2 clinicians, ranking our machine translations close to the human translations. Discussion We showed that, even after optimizing the hyperparameters out-of-domain, the inclusion of available resources from the clinical domain and applied methods were beneficial for the described objective, managing to obtain adequate translations of EHR templates. Conclusion We have developed a system which is able to properly translate health record templates from Basque to Spanish without making use of any bilingual corpus of clinical texts or health records.


2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. HAKAMI ◽  
D. BOLLEGALA

AbstractFinding translations for technical terms is an important problem in machine translation. In particular, in highly specialized domains such as biology or medicine, it is difficult to find bilingual experts to annotate sufficient cross-lingual texts in order to train machine translation systems. Moreover, new terms are constantly being generated in the biomedical community, which makes it difficult to keep the translation dictionaries up to date for all language pairs of interest. Given a biomedical term in one language (source language), we propose a method for detecting its translations in a different language (target language). Specifically, we train a binary classifier to determine whether two biomedical terms written in two languages are translations. Training such a classifier is often complicated due to the lack of common features between the source and target languages. We propose several feature space concatenation methods to successfully overcome this problem. Moreover, we study the effectiveness of contextual and character n-gram features for detecting term translations. Experiments conducted using a standard dataset for biomedical term translation show that the proposed method outperforms several competitive baseline methods in terms of mean average precision and top-k translation accuracy.


2004 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz Josef Och ◽  
Hermann Ney

A phrase-based statistical machine translation approach — the alignment template approach — is described. This translation approach allows for general many-to-many relations between words. Thereby, the context of words is taken into account in the translation model, and local changes in word order from source to target language can be learned explicitly. The model is described using a log-linear modeling approach, which is a generalization of the often used source-channel approach. Thereby, the model is easier to extend than classical statistical machine translation systems. We describe in detail the process for learning phrasal translations, the feature functions used, and the search algorithm. The evaluation of this approach is performed on three different tasks. For the German-English speech Verbmobil task, we analyze the effect of various system components. On the French-English Canadian Hansards task, the alignment template system obtains significantly better results than a single-word-based translation model. In the Chinese-English 2002 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) machine translation evaluation it yields statistically significantly better NIST scores than all competing research and commercial translation systems.


2009 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arvi Tavast

Abstract This paper combines the communicative model of translation with performative linguistics to arrive at a translation model that is meant to proactively shape the attitudes of future translators. Central to this model is the claim that the translator, like any communicator, has a communicative intent that gets expressed in the target text. This is contrasted with machine translation, which is concerned with finding equivalents to translation units without actually having anything to say in the target language. The paper concludes by indicating a way of building a translation evaluation system on the proposed model.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 9386-9393
Author(s):  
Jian Yang ◽  
Shuming Ma ◽  
Dongdong Zhang ◽  
ShuangZhi Wu ◽  
Zhoujun Li ◽  
...  

Language model pre-training has achieved success in many natural language processing tasks. Existing methods for cross-lingual pre-training adopt Translation Language Model to predict masked words with the concatenation of the source sentence and its target equivalent. In this work, we introduce a novel cross-lingual pre-training method, called Alternating Language Modeling (ALM). It code-switches sentences of different languages rather than simple concatenation, hoping to capture the rich cross-lingual context of words and phrases. More specifically, we randomly substitute source phrases with target translations to create code-switched sentences. Then, we use these code-switched data to train ALM model to learn to predict words of different languages. We evaluate our pre-training ALM on the downstream tasks of machine translation and cross-lingual classification. Experiments show that ALM can outperform the previous pre-training methods on three benchmarks.1


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