scholarly journals Source-Side Discontinuous Phrases for Machine Translation: A Comparative Study on Phrase Extraction and Search

2013 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-38
Author(s):  
Matthias Huck ◽  
Erik Scharwächter ◽  
Hermann Ney
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Search Algorithm ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Empirical Evaluation ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Beam Search ◽  
Phrase Extraction ◽  
System Configurations ◽  
Translation Systems

Abstract Standard phrase-based statistical machine translation systems generate translations based on an inventory of continuous bilingual phrases. In this work, we extend a phrase-based decoder with the ability to make use of phrases that are discontinuous in the source part. Our dynamic programming beam search algorithm supports separate pruning of coverage hypotheses per cardinality and of lexical hypotheses per coverage, as well as coverage constraints that impose restrictions on the possible reorderings. In addition to investigating these aspects, which are related to the decoding procedure, we also concentrate our attention on the question of how to obtain source-side discontinuous phrases from parallel training data. Two approaches (hierarchical and discontinuous extraction) are presented and compared. On a large-scale Chinese!English translation task, we conduct a thorough empirical evaluation in order to study a number of system configurations with source-side discontinuous phrases, and to compare them to setups which employ continuous phrases only.

Neural machine translation of low-resource languages using SMT phrase pair injection

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Sukanta Sen ◽  
Mohammed Hasanuzzaman ◽  
Asif Ekbal ◽  
Pushpak Bhattacharyya ◽  
Andy Way
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Production Systems ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Original Training ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Better Than

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.

scholarly journals The Alignment Template Approach to Statistical Machine Translation

2004 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz Josef Och ◽  
Hermann Ney
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Search Algorithm ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Linear Modeling ◽  
Translation Model ◽  
Log Linear ◽  
Translation Systems ◽  
English Canadian

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.

scholarly journals Word Reordering and a Dynamic Programming Beam Search Algorithm for Statistical Machine Translation

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Tillmann ◽  
Hermann Ney
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Programming ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Search Algorithm ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Search Procedure ◽  
Beam Search ◽  
Translation Model ◽  
Novel Technique ◽  
The Traveling Salesman Problem

In this article, we describe an efficient beam search algorithm for statistical machine translation based on dynamic programming (DP). The search algorithm uses the translation model presented in Brown et al. (1993). Starting from a DP-based solution to the traveling-salesman problem, we present a novel technique to restrict the possible word reorderings between source and target language in order to achieve an efficient search algorithm. Word reordering restrictions especially useful for the translation direction German to English are presented. The restrictions are generalized, and a set of four parameters to control the word reordering is introduced, which then can easily be adopted to new translation directions. The beam search procedure has been successfully tested on the Verbmobil task (German to English, 8,000-word vocabulary) and on the Canadian Hansards task (French to English, 100,000-word vocabulary). For the medium-sized Verbmobil task, a sentence can be translated in a few seconds, only a small number of search errors occur, and there is no performance degradation as measured by the word error criterion used in this article.

scholarly journals Scalable Reordering Models for SMT based on Multiclass SVM

2015 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdullah Alrajeh ◽  
Mahesan Niranjan
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Classification Problem ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Dual Coordinate Descent ◽  
Baseline System ◽  
Multiclass Svm ◽  
Translation Systems

Abstract In state-of-the-art phrase-based statistical machine translation systems, modelling phrase reorderings is an important need to enhance naturalness of the translated outputs, particularly when the grammatical structures of the language pairs differ significantly. Posing phrase movements as a classification problem, we exploit recent developments in solving large-scale multiclass support vector machines. Using dual coordinate descent methods for learning, we provide a mechanism to shrink the amount of training data required for each iteration. Hence, we produce significant computational saving while preserving the accuracy of the models. Our approach is a couple of times faster than maximum entropy approach and more memory-efficient (50% reduction). Experiments were carried out on an Arabic-English corpus with more than a quarter of a billion words. We achieve BLEU score improvements on top of a strong baseline system with sparse reordering features.

scholarly journals Can machine translation systems be evaluated by the crowd alone

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
YVETTE GRAHAM ◽  
TIMOTHY BALDWIN ◽  
ALISTAIR MOFFAT ◽  
JUSTIN ZOBEL
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Crowd Sourcing ◽  
Direct Estimate ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Relative Preference ◽  
Human Evaluation ◽  
Estimate Method ◽  
Translation Systems

AbstractCrowd-sourced assessments of machine translation quality allow evaluations to be carried out cheaply and on a large scale. It is essential, however, that the crowd's work be filtered to avoid contamination of results through the inclusion of false assessments. One method is to filter via agreement with experts, but even amongst experts agreement levels may not be high. In this paper, we present a new methodology for crowd-sourcing human assessments of translation quality, which allows individual workers to develop their own individual assessment strategy. Agreement with experts is no longer required, and a worker is deemed reliable if they are consistent relative to their own previous work. Individual translations are assessed in isolation from all others in the form of direct estimates of translation quality. This allows more meaningful statistics to be computed for systems and enables significance to be determined on smaller sets of assessments. We demonstrate the methodology's feasibility in large-scale human evaluation through replication of the human evaluation component of Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation shared translation task for two language pairs, Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish. Results for measurement based solely on crowd-sourced assessments show system rankings in line with those of the original evaluation. Comparison of results produced by the relative preference approach and the direct estimate method described here demonstrate that the direct estimate method has a substantially increased ability to identify significant differences between translation systems.

scholarly journals Lexical-Constraint-Aware Neural Machine Translation via Data Augmentation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guanhua Chen ◽  
Yun Chen ◽  
Yong Wang ◽  
Victor O.K. Li
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Data Augmentation ◽  
Search Algorithm ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Training Corpus ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Source Sentence

Leveraging lexical constraint is extremely significant in domain-specific machine translation and interactive machine translation. Previous studies mainly focus on extending beam search algorithm or augmenting the training corpus by replacing source phrases with the corresponding target translation. These methods either suffer from the heavy computation cost during inference or depend on the quality of the bilingual dictionary pre-specified by user or constructed with statistical machine translation. In response to these problems, we present a conceptually simple and empirically effective data augmentation approach in lexical constrained neural machine translation. Specifically, we make constraint-aware training data by first randomly sampling the phrases of the reference as constraints, and then packing them together into the source sentence with a separation symbol. Extensive experiments on several language pairs demonstrate that our approach achieves superior translation results over the existing systems, improving translation of constrained sentences without hurting the unconstrained ones.

Linguistically Annotated Reordering: Evaluation and Analysis

2010 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deyi Xiong ◽  
Min Zhang ◽  
Aiti Aw ◽  
Haizhou Li
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Analysis Method ◽  
Complementary Information ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Parse Trees ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Insight Into

Linguistic knowledge plays an important role in phrase movement in statistical machine translation. To efficiently incorporate linguistic knowledge into phrase reordering, we propose a new approach: Linguistically Annotated Reordering (LAR). In LAR, we build hard hierarchical skeletons and inject soft linguistic knowledge from source parse trees to nodes of hard skeletons during translation. The experimental results on large-scale training data show that LAR is comparable to boundary word-based reordering (BWR) (Xiong, Liu, and Lin 2006), which is a very competitive lexicalized reordering approach. When combined with BWR, LAR provides complementary information for phrase reordering, which collectively improves the BLEU score significantly. To further understand the contribution of linguistic knowledge in LAR to phrase reordering, we introduce a syntax-based analysis method to automatically detect constituent movement in both reference and system translations, and summarize syntactic reordering patterns that are captured by reordering models. With the proposed analysis method, we conduct a comparative analysis that not only provides the insight into how linguistic knowledge affects phrase movement but also reveals new challenges in phrase reordering.

scholarly journals Paraphrasing Training Data for Statistical Machine Translation

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 101-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Nichols ◽  
Francis Bond ◽  
D. Scott Appling ◽  
Yuji Matsumoto
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Training Data
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