Neural machine translation (NMT) suffers a performance deficiency when a limited vocabulary fails to cover the source or target side adequately, which happens frequently when dealing with morphologically rich languages. To address this problem, previous work focused on adjusting translation granularity or expanding the vocabulary size. However, morphological information is relatively under-considered in NMT architectures, which may further improve translation quality. We propose a novel method, which can not only reduce data sparsity but also model morphology through a simple but effective mechanism. By predicting the stem and suffix separately during decoding, our system achieves an improvement of up to 1.98 BLEU compared with previous work on English to Russian translation. Our method is orthogonal to different NMT architectures and stably gains improvements on various domains.

We describe MultiSynth, a framework for synthesizing domain-specific programs from a multimodal dataset of examples. Given a domain-specific language (DSL), a dataset is multimodal if there is no single program in the DSL that generalizes over all the examples. Further, even if the examples in the dataset were generalized in terms of a set of programs, the domains of these programs may not be disjoint, thereby leading to ambiguity in synthesis. MultiSynth is a framework that incorporates concepts of synthesizing programs with minimum generality, while addressing the need of accurate prediction. We show how these can be achieved through (i) transformation driven partitioning of the dataset, (ii) least general generalization, for a generalized specification of the input and the output, and (iii) learning to rank, for estimating feature weights in order to map an input to the most appropriate mode in case of ambiguity. We show the effectiveness of our framework in two domains: in the first case, we extend an existing approach for synthesizing programs for XML tree transformations to ambiguous multimodal datasets. In the second case, MultiSynth is used to preorder words for machine translation, by learning permutations of productions in the parse trees of the source side sentences. Our evaluations reflect the effectiveness of our approach.

Providing learning content in a learner's native language has always been a major challenge for knowledge transfer in global environments. With all technology advancements, the process has remained highly manual – slow, cumbersome, and expensive. Once content is available in a source language, translators are hired – typically through external agencies – who then manually translate into the required language. Then, to ensure your business specific lingo and context was translated correctly, another intensive quality assurance step is done with local experts – which often takes longer than the translation itself, due to resource bottlenecks. Multiply this by lots of content and lots of languages – and add, as a further ingredient, that the original source content may change while translation projects are already underway – and you soon get to unsolvable scalability and funding challenges.

He pulls [a notebook] down--it's from the late 1950s. Ever since he was a teenager, he has captured some 10,000 examples of swapped syllables ("hypodeemic nerdle"), malapropisms ("runs the gambit"), "malaphors" ("easy-go-lucky"), and so on, about half of them committed by Hofstadter himself. He makes photocopies of his notebook pages, cuts them up with scissors, and stores the errors in filing cabinets and labeled boxes around his study.

As a language lover and an impassioned translator, as a cognitive scientist and a lifelong admirer of the human mind's subtlety, I have followed the attempts to mechanize translation for decades. When I look at an article in Russian, I say, "This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode." Some years later he offered a different viewpoint: "No reasonable person thinks that a machine translation can ever achieve elegance and style. Having devoted one unforgettably intense year of my life to translating Alexander Pushkin's sparkling novel in verse Eugene Onegin into my native tongue (that is, having radically reworked that great Russian work into an English-language novel in verse), I find this remark of Weaver's far more congenial than his earlier remark, which reveals a strangely simplistic view of language.

Decades ago, Star Trek introduced the idea of a "universal translator," a small baton that let crew members converse with aliens in their native languages simply by flipping a switch. This app isn't part of the pre-installed loadout on most phones, but it's indispensable when you travel. It's so overflowing with features, in fact, you might not even realize everything it can do. So here are the six most awesome and useful things you can do with Google Translate on your smartphone. You won't always have the best mobile data connection while traveling the world, so it's a good idea to have an offline backup in Translate.

In this paper, we present Neural Phrase-based Machine Translation (NPMT). Our method explicitly models the phrase structures in output sequences using Sleep-WAke Networks (SWAN), a recently proposed segmentation-based sequence modeling method. To mitigate the monotonic alignment requirement of SWAN, we introduce a new layer to perform (soft) local reordering of input sequences. Different from existing neural machine translation (NMT) approaches, NPMT does not use attention-based decoding mechanisms. Instead, it directly outputs phrases in a sequential order and can decode in linear time. Our experiments show that NPMT achieves superior performances on IWSLT 2014 German-English/English-German and IWSLT 2015 English-Vietnamese machine translation tasks compared with strong NMT baselines. We also observe that our method produces meaningful phrases in output languages.

Learning meaningful representations that maintain the content necessary for a particular task while filtering away detrimental variations is a problem of great interest in machine learning. In this paper, we tackle the problem of learning representations invariant to a specific factor or trait of data. The representation learning process is formulated as an adversarial minimax game. We analyze the optimal equilibrium of such a game and find that it amounts to maximizing the uncertainty of inferring the detrimental factor given the representation while maximizing the certainty of making task-specific predictions. On three benchmark tasks, namely fair and bias-free classification, language-independent generation, and lighting-independent image classification, we show that the proposed framework induces an invariant representation, and leads to better generalization evidenced by the improved performance.

Out-of-vocabulary word translation is a major problem for the translation of low-resource languages that suffer from a lack of parallel training data. This paper evaluates the contributions of target-language context models towards the translation of OOV words, specifically in those cases where OOV translations are derived from external knowledge sources, such as dictionaries. We develop both neural and non-neural context models and evaluate them within both phrase-based and self-attention based neural machine translation systems. Our results show that neural language models that integrate additional context beyond the current sentence are the most effective in disambiguating possible OOV word translations. We present an efficient second-pass lattice-rescoring method for wide-context neural language models and demonstrate performance improvements over state-of-the-art self-attention based neural MT systems in five out of six low-resource language pairs.

Craig Stern is the Marketing Director for the Americas at Systran Software Inc. a market leader in secure neural machine translation. An SDSU graduate, his feats have included: filing a patent in college, built and launched a machine translation mobile app and a social venture in the eyewear industry. He has in-depth expertise with disruptive technology. In addition, he is a prolific content writer, covering the convergence of neural machine translation, voice-to-text, economics and culture. His content has been published in Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur and The Next Web, in addition to his articles in Disruptor Daily.