Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 Workshop on Building and using parallel texts data driven machine translation and beyond -

2003 ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Peter Nabende

Natural Language Processing for under-resourced languages is now a mainstream research area. However, there are limited studies on Natural Language Processing applications for many indigenous East African languages. As a contribution to covering the current gap of knowledge, this paper focuses on evaluating the application of well-established machine translation methods for one heavily under-resourced indigenous East African language called Lumasaaba. Specifically, we review the most common machine translation methods in the context of Lumasaaba including both rule-based and data-driven methods. Then we apply a state of the art data-driven machine translation method to learn models for automating translation between Lumasaaba and English using a very limited data set of parallel sentences. Automatic evaluation results show that a transformer-based Neural Machine Translation model architecture leads to consistently better BLEU scores than the recurrent neural network-based models. Moreover, the automatically generated translations can be comprehended to a reasonable extent and are usually associated with the source language input.


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANN IRVINE ◽  
CHRIS CALLISON-BURCH

AbstractWe use bilingual lexicon induction techniques, which learn translations from monolingual texts in two languages, to build an end-to-end statistical machine translation (SMT) system without the use of any bilingual sentence-aligned parallel corpora. We present detailed analysis of the accuracy of bilingual lexicon induction, and show how a discriminative model can be used to combine various signals of translation equivalence (like contextual similarity, temporal similarity, orthographic similarity and topic similarity). Our discriminative model produces higher accuracy translations than previous bilingual lexicon induction techniques. We reuse these signals of translation equivalence as features on a phrase-based SMT system. These monolingually estimated features enhance low resource SMT systems in addition to allowing end-to-end machine translation without parallel corpora.


Author(s):  
Petya Osenova ◽  
Kiril Simov

The data-driven Bulgarian WordNet: BTBWNThe paper presents our work towards the simultaneous creation of a data-driven WordNet for Bulgarian and a manually annotated treebank with semantic information. Such an approach requires synchronization of the word senses in both - syntactic and lexical resources, without limiting the WordNet senses to the corpus or vice versa. Our strategy focuses on the identification of senses used in BulTreeBank, but the missing senses of a lemma also have been covered through exploration of bigger corpora. The identified senses have been organized in synsets for the Bulgarian WordNet. Then they have been aligned to the Princeton WordNet synsets. Various types of mappings are considered between both resources in a cross-lingual aspect and with respect to ensuring maximum connectivity and potential for incorporating the language specific concepts. The mapping between the two WordNets (English and Bulgarian) is a basis for applications such as machine translation and multilingual information retrieval. Oparty na danych WordNet bułgarski: BTBWNW artykule przedstawiono naszą pracę na rzecz jednoczesnej budowy opartego na danych wordnetu dla języka bułgarskiego oraz ręcznie oznaczonego informacjami semantycznymi banku drzew. Takie podejście wymaga uzgodnienia znaczeń słów zarówno w zasobach składniowych, jak i leksykalnych, bez ograniczania znaczeń umieszczanych w wordnecie do tych obecnych w korpusie, jak i odwrotnie. Nasza strategia koncentruje się na identyfikacji znaczeń stosowanych w BulTreeBank, przy czym brakujące znaczenia lematu zostały również zbadane przez zgłębienie większych korpusów. Zidentyfikowane znaczenia zostały zorganizowane w synsety bułgarskiego wordnetu, a następnie powiązane z synsetami Princeton WordNet. Rozmaite rodzaje rzutowań są rozpatrywane pomiędzy obydwoma zasobami w kontekście międzyjęzykowym, a także w odniesieniu do zapewnienia maksymalnej łączności i możliwości uwzględnienia pojęć specyficznych dla języka bułgarskiego. Rzutowanie między dwoma wordnetami (angielskim i bułgarskim) jest podstawą dla aplikacji, takich jak tłumaczenie maszynowe i wielojęzyczne wyszukiwanie informacji.


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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 999-1023 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gennadi Lembersky ◽  
Noam Ordan ◽  
Shuly Wintner

Translation models used for statistical machine translation are compiled from parallel corpora that are manually translated. The common assumption is that parallel texts are symmetrical: The direction of translation is deemed irrelevant and is consequently ignored. Much research in Translation Studies indicates that the direction of translation matters, however, as translated language (translationese) has many unique properties. It has already been shown that phrase tables constructed from parallel corpora translated in the same direction as the translation task outperform those constructed from corpora translated in the opposite direction. We reconfirm that this is indeed the case, but emphasize the importance of also using texts translated in the “wrong” direction. We take advantage of information pertaining to the direction of translation in constructing phrase tables by adapting the translation model to the special properties of translationese. We explore two adaptation techniques: First, we create a mixture model by interpolating phrase tables trained on texts translated in the “right” and the “wrong” directions. The weights for the interpolation are determined by minimizing perplexity. Second, we define entropy-based measures that estimate the correspondence of target-language phrases to translationese, thereby eliminating the need to annotate the parallel corpus with information pertaining to the direction of translation. We show that incorporating these measures as features in the phrase tables of statistical machine translation systems results in consistent, statistically significant improvement in the quality of the translation.


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