Everyone is looking for the next breakthrough in machine translation. No one believes that machine translation is a completely solved problem. Most people would like to see machine translation systems produce higher quality results. A good translation is one where the meaning of the source is preserved, and it is rendered correctly in the target language. Users expect accuracy on all of the various levels–grammar, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

For any cloud to be taken seriously, it has to meet an ever rising bar of features. Machine learning seems to be on that list, as all the major cloud providers now feature it. But how they go about doing it is another story. Aside from the "curated API vs. open-ended algorithm marketplace" models, there are the "everything and then some vs. just enough" variants. Here's how the four big cloud providers -- IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon -- stack up next to each other in machine learning. When IBM first announced it would turn its Watson AI system into a consumable service, the questions piled up.

One day in the not-so-distant future, an app might make a dinner reservation for you before you realize you even want to go out, or your smartphone might suggest tourist sights you'd enjoy when you land in a new city. It's possible -- and it's really not so far away, say analysts, who were encouraged today by Google's announcement that it's open sourcing an enhanced machine learning system. The system, dubbed TensorFlow, is smarter, faster and more flexible machine-learning software than Google has ever had before, according to Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, in a blog post . "Just a couple of years ago, you couldn't talk to the Google app through the noise of a city sidewalk, or read a sign in Russian using Google Translate, or instantly find pictures of your Labradoodle in Google Photos," wrote Pichai. But in a short amount of time they've gotten much, much smarter. Now, thanks to machine learning, you can do all those things pretty easily, and a lot more."

Parallel texts are a relatively rare language resource, however, they constitute a very useful research material with a wide range of applications. This study presents and analyses new methodologies we developed for obtaining such data from previously built comparable corpora. The methodologies are automatic and unsupervised which makes them good for large scale research. The task is highly practical as non-parallel multilingual data occur much more frequently than parallel corpora and accessing them is easy, although parallel sentences are a considerably more useful resource. In this study, we propose a method of automatic web crawling in order to build topic-aligned comparable corpora, e.g. based on the Wikipedia or Euronews.com. We also developed new methods of obtaining parallel sentences from comparable data and proposed methods of filtration of corpora capable of selecting inconsistent or only partially equivalent translations. Our methods are easily scalable to other languages. Evaluation of the quality of the created corpora was performed by analysing the impact of their use on statistical machine translation systems. Experiments were presented on the basis of the Polish-English language pair for texts from different domains, i.e. lectures, phrasebooks, film dialogues, European Parliament proceedings and texts contained medicines leaflets. We also tested a second method of creating parallel corpora based on data from comparable corpora which allows for automatically expanding the existing corpus of sentences about a given domain on the basis of analogies found between them. It does not require, therefore, having past parallel resources in order to train a classifier.

Sequence to sequence learning has recently emerged as a new paradigm in supervised learning. To date, most of its applications focused on only one task and not much work explored this framework for multiple tasks. This paper examines three multi-task learning (MTL) settings for sequence to sequence models: (a) the oneto-many setting - where the encoder is shared between several tasks such as machine translation and syntactic parsing, (b) the many-to-one setting - useful when only the decoder can be shared, as in the case of translation and image caption generation, and (c) the many-to-many setting - where multiple encoders and decoders are shared, which is the case with unsupervised objectives and translation. Our results show that training on a small amount of parsing and image caption data can improve the translation quality between English and German by up to 1.5 BLEU points over strong single-task baselines on the WMT benchmarks. Furthermore, we have established a new state-of-the-art result in constituent parsing with 93.0 F1. Lastly, we reveal interesting properties of the two unsupervised learning objectives, autoencoder and skip-thought, in the MTL context: autoencoder helps less in terms of perplexities but more on BLEU scores compared to skip-thought.

Automatic description generation from natural images is a challenging problem that has recently received a large amount of interest from the computer vision and natural language processing communities. In this survey, we classify the existing approaches based on how they conceptualize this problem, viz., models that cast description as either generation problem or as a retrieval problem over a visual or multimodal representational space. We provide a detailed review of existing models, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, we give an overview of the benchmark image datasets and the evaluation measures that have been developed to assess the quality of machine-generated image descriptions.

Linguistic borrowing is the phenomenon of transferring linguistic constructions (lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic) from a donor language to a recipient language as a result of contacts between communities speaking different languages. Borrowed words are found in all languages, andin contrast to cognate relationshipsborrowing relationships may exist across unrelated languages (for example, about 40% of Swahilis vocabulary is borrowed from the unrelated language Arabic). In this work, we develop a model of morpho-phonological transformations across languages. Its features are based on universal constraints from Optimality Theory (OT), and we show that compared to several standardbut linguistically more naïvebaselines, our OT-inspired model obtains good performance at predicting donor forms from borrowed forms with only a few dozen training examples, making this a cost-effective strategy for sharing lexical information across languages. We demonstrate applications of the lexical borrowing model in machine translation, using resource-rich donor language to obtain translations of out-of-vocabulary loanwords in a lower resource language. Our framework obtains substantial improvements (up to 1.6 BLEU) over standard baselines.

We describe a hybridisation strategy whose objective is to integrate linguistic resources from shallow-transfer rule-based machine translation (RBMT) into phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT). It basically consists of enriching the phrase table of a PBSMT system with bilingual phrase pairs matching transfer rules and dictionary entries from a shallow-transfer RBMT system. This new strategy takes advantage of how the linguistic resources are used by the RBMT system to segment the source-language sentences to be translated, and overcomes the limitations of existing hybrid approaches that treat the RBMT systems as a black box. Experimental results confirm that our approach delivers translations of higher quality than existing ones, and that it is specially useful when the parallel corpus available for training the SMT system is small or when translating out-of-domain texts that are well covered by the RBMT dictionaries. A combination of this approach with a recently proposed unsupervised shallow-transfer rule inference algorithm results in a significantly greater translation quality than that of a baseline PBSMT; in this case, the only hand-crafted resource used are the dictionaries commonly used in RBMT. Moreover, the translation quality achieved by the hybrid system built with automatically inferred rules is similar to that obtained by those built with hand-crafted rules.

With the increasingly global nature of our everyday interactions, the need for multilin- gual technologies to support efficient and effective information access and communication cannot be overemphasized. Computational modeling of language has been the focus of Natural Language Processing, a subdiscipline of Artificial Intelligence. One of the current challenges for this discipline is to design methodologies and algorithms that are cross- language in order to create multilingual technologies rapidly. The goal of this JAIR special issue on Cross-Language Algorithms and Applications (CLAA) is to present leading re- search in this area, with emphasis on developing unifying themes that could lead to the development of the science of multi- and cross-lingualism. In this introduction, we provide the reader with the motivation for this special issue and summarize the contributions of the papers that have been included. The selected papers cover a broad range of cross-lingual technologies including machine translation, domain and language adaptation for sentiment analysis, cross-language lexical resources, dependency parsing, information retrieval and knowledge representation. We anticipate that this special issue will serve as an invaluable resource for researchers interested in topics of cross-lingual natural language processing.

One of the main driving forces in Speech Technology, for the last several years, comes from the efforts of various groups and organizations tackling with the issue of disability, specifically deaf and hard of hearing people. Most notably, a long term effort by such organisations has lead to a plan by the European Commision to enable "Subtitling of 100% of programs in public TV all over the EU by 2020 with simple technical standards and consumer friendly rules" [15]. This ambitious task would not be possible to achieve without the aid of Speech Technology. While there has been a considerable improvement of quality of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology recently, many of the tasks present in real-life are simply beyond complete automation. On the other hand, there are tasks, which are also impossible to achieve by humans without the aid of ASR.