Machine Translation
Introduction to the Special Issue on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Porter, Bruce, Cheetham, William
We are very pleased to republish here extended versions of a sample of the papers drawn from the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-06), which was held July 17-20, 2006, in Boston, Massachusetts. Three of these articles describe deployed applications and two describe emerging applications.
Translation of Pronominal Anaphora between English and Spanish: Discrepancies and Evaluation
This paper evaluates the different tasks carried out in the translation of pronominal anaphora in a machine translation (MT) system. The MT interlingua approach named AGIR (Anaphora Generation with an Interlingua Representation) improves upon other proposals presented to date because it is able to translate intersentential anaphors, detect co-reference chains, and translate Spanish zero pronouns into English---issues hardly considered by other systems. The paper presents the resolution and evaluation of these anaphora problems in AGIR with the use of different kinds of knowledge (lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic). The translation of English and Spanish anaphoric third-person personal pronouns (including Spanish zero pronouns) into the target language has been evaluated on unrestricted corpora. We have obtained a precision of 80.4% and 84.8% in the translation of Spanish and English pronouns, respectively. Although we have only studied the Spanish and English languages, our approach can be easily extended to other languages such as Portuguese, Italian, or Japanese.
MiTAP for Biosecurity: A Case Study
Damianos, Laurie, Ponte, Jay, Wohlever, Steve, Reeder, Florence, Day, David, Wilson, George, Hirschman, Lynette
MITAP (MITRE text and audio processing) is a prototype system available for monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and other global events. MITAP focuses on providing timely, multilingual, global information access to medical experts and individuals involved in humanitarian assistance and relief work. Multiple information sources in multiple languages are automatically captured, filtered, translated, summarized, and categorized by disease, region, information source, person, and organization. Critical information is automatically extracted and tagged to facilitate browsing, searching, and sorting. The system supports shared situational awareness through collaboration, allowing users to submit other articles for processing, annotate existing documents, post directly to the system, and flag messages for others to see. MITAP currently stores over 1 million articles and processes an additional 2,000 to 10,000 daily, delivering up-to-date information to dozens of regular users.
Automating Knowledge Acquisition for Machine Translation
Machine translation of human languages (for example, Japanese, English, Spanish) was one of the earliest goals of computer science research, and it remains an elusive one. Like many AI tasks, trans-lation requires an immense amount of knowledge about language and the world. Recent approaches to machine translation frequently make use of text-based learning algorithms to fully or partially automate the acquisition of knowledge. This article illustrates these approaches.
Automating Knowledge Acquisition for Machine Translation
Machine translation of human languages (for example, Japanese, English, Spanish) was one of the earliest goals of computer science research, and it remains an elusive one. Like many AI tasks, trans-lation requires an immense amount of knowledge about language and the world. Recent approaches to machine translation frequently make use of text-based learning algorithms to fully or partially automate the acquisition of knowledge. This article illustrates these approaches.
JANUS: Speech-to-Speech Translation Using Connectionist and Non-Connectionist Techniques
Waibel, Alex, Jain, Ajay N., McNair, Arthur E., Tebelskis, Joe, Osterholtz, Louise, Saito, Hiroaki, Schmidbauer, Otto, Sloboda, Tilo, Woszczyna, Monika
JANUS translates continuously spoken English and German into German, English, and Japanese. JANUS currently achieves 87% translation fidelity from English speech and 97% from German speech. We present the JANUS system along with comparative evaluations of its interchangeable processing components, with special emphasis on the connectionist modules.
JANUS: Speech-to-Speech Translation Using Connectionist and Non-Connectionist Techniques
Waibel, Alex, Jain, Ajay N., McNair, Arthur E., Tebelskis, Joe, Osterholtz, Louise, Saito, Hiroaki, Schmidbauer, Otto, Sloboda, Tilo, Woszczyna, Monika
JANUS translates continuously spoken English and German into German, English, and Japanese. JANUS currently achieves 87% translation fidelity from English speech and 97% from German speech. We present the JANUS system along with comparative evaluations of its interchangeable processing components, with special emphasis on the connectionist modules.
Translating Locative Prepositions
The features used in the spatial representations were abstracted from Herskovits (1986). The network was trained using the generalized delta rule (Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams, 1986) on a set of patterns with four components, three syntactic and one semantic. The syntactic components are a pair of nouns separated by a locative preposition [NI-LP-N21, and the semantic component is a representation of the spatial relationship [SR1.