Machine Translation
Enhanced Bilingual Evaluation Understudy
Wołk, Krzysztof, Marasek, Krzysztof
Our research extends the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) evaluation technique for statistical machine translation to make it more adjustable and robust. We intend to adapt it to resemble human evaluation more. We perform experiments to evaluate the performance of our technique against the primary existing evaluation methods. We describe and show the improvements it makes over existing methods as well as correlation to them. When human translators translate a text, they often use synonyms, different word orders or style, and other similar variations. We propose an SMT evaluation technique that enhances the BLEU metric to consider variations such as those.
Polish to English Statistical Machine Translation
This research explores the effects of various training settings on a Polish to English Statistical Machine Translation system for spoken language. Various elements of the TED, Europarl, and OPUS parallel text corpora were used as the basis for training of language models, for development, tuning and testing of the translation system. The BLEU, NIST, METEOR and TER metrics were used to evaluate the effects of the data preparations on the translation results.
Real-Time Statistical Speech Translation
Wołk, Krzysztof, Marasek, Krzysztof
This research investigates the Statistical Machine Translation approaches to translate speech in real time automatically. Such systems can be used in a pipeline with speech recognition and synthesis software in order to produce a real-time voice communication system between foreigners. We obtained three main data sets from spoken proceedings that represent three different types of human speech. TED, Europarl, and OPUS parallel text corpora were used as the basis for training of language models, for developmental tuning and testing of the translation system. We also conducted experiments involving part of speech tagging, compound splitting, linear language model interpolation, TrueCasing and morphosyntactic analysis. We evaluated the effects of variety of data preparations on the translation results using the BLEU, NIST, METEOR and TER metrics and tried to give answer which metric is most suitable for PL-EN language pair.
Polish - English Speech Statistical Machine Translation Systems for the IWSLT 2013
Wołk, Krzysztof, Marasek, Krzysztof
This research explores the effects of various training settings from Polish to English Statistical Machine Translation system for spoken language. Various elements of the TED parallel text corpora for the IWSLT 2013 evaluation campaign were used as the basis for training of language models, and for development, tuning and testing of the translation system. The BLEU, NIST, METEOR and TER metrics were used to evaluate the effects of data preparations on translation results. Our experiments included systems, which use stems and morphological information on Polish words. We also conducted a deep analysis of provided Polish data as preparatory work for the automatic data correction and cleaning phase.
Polish -English Statistical Machine Translation of Medical Texts
Wołk, Krzysztof, Marasek, Krzysztof
This new research explores the effects of various training methods on a Polish to English Statistical Machine Translation system for medical texts. Various elements of the EMEA parallel text corpora from the OPUS project were used as the basis for training of phrase tables and language models and for development, tuning and testing of the translation system. The BLEU, NIST, METEOR, RIBES and TER metrics have been used to evaluate the effects of various system and data preparations on translation results. Our experiments included systems that used POS tagging, factored phrase models, hierarchical models, syntactic taggers, and many different alignment methods. We also conducted a deep analysis of Polish data as preparatory work for automatic data correction such as true casing and punctuation normalization phase.
Neural-based machine translation for medical text domain. Based on European Medicines Agency leaflet texts
Wołk, Krzysztof, Marasek, Krzysztof
The quality of machine translation is rapidly evolving. Today one can find several machine translation systems on the web that provide reasonable translations, although the systems are not perfect. In some specific domains, the quality may decrease. A recently proposed approach to this domain is neural machine translation. It aims at building a jointly-tuned single neural network that maximizes translation performance, a very different approach from traditional statistical machine translation. Recently proposed neural machine translation models often belong to the encoder-decoder family in which a source sentence is encoded into a fixed length vector that is, in turn, decoded to generate a translation. The present research examines the effects of different training methods on a Polish-English Machine Translation system used for medical data. The European Medicines Agency parallel text corpus was used as the basis for training of neural and statistical network-based translation systems. The main machine translation evaluation metrics have also been used in analysis of the systems. A comparison and implementation of a real-time medical translator is the main focus of our experiments.
Building Subject-aligned Comparable Corpora and Mining it for Truly Parallel Sentence Pairs
Wołk, Krzysztof, Marasek, Krzysztof
Parallel sentences are a relatively scarce but extremely useful resource for many applications including cross-lingual retrieval and statistical machine translation. This research explores our methodology for mining such data from previously obtained comparable corpora. The task is highly practical since non-parallel multilingual data exist in far greater quantities than parallel corpora, but parallel sentences are a much more useful resource. Here we propose a web crawling method for building subject-aligned comparable corpora from Wikipedia articles. We also introduce a method for extracting truly parallel sentences that are filtered out from noisy or just comparable sentence pairs. We describe our implementation of a specialized tool for this task as well as training and adaption of a machine translation system that supplies our filter with additional information about the similarity of comparable sentence pairs.
Leveraging Online User Feedback to Improve Statistical Machine Translation
Formiga, Lluís, Barrón-Cedeño, Alberto, Màrquez, Lluís, Henríquez, Carlos A., Mariño, José B.
In this article we present a three-step methodology for dynamically improving a statistical machine translation (SMT) system by incorporating human feedback in the form of free edits on the system translations. We target at feedback provided by casual users, which is typically error-prone. Thus, we first propose a filtering step to automatically identify the better user-edited translations and discard the useless ones. A second step produces a pivot-based alignment between source and user-edited sentences, focusing on the errors made by the system. Finally, a third step produces a new translation model and combines it linearly with the one from the original system. We perform a thorough evaluation on a real-world dataset collected from the Reverso.net translation service and show that every step in our methodology contributes significantly to improve a general purpose SMT system. Interestingly, the quality improvement is not only due to the increase of lexical coverage, but to a better lexical selection, reordering, and morphology. Finally, we show the robustness of the methodology by applying it to a different scenario, in which the new examples come from an automatically Web-crawled parallel corpus. Using exactly the same architecture and models provides again a significant improvement of the translation quality of a general purpose baseline SMT system.
Discriminative Reordering Model Adaptation via Structural Learning
Zhang, Biao (Xiamen University) | Su, Jinsong (Xiamen University) | Xiong, Deyi (Soochow University) | Duan, Hong (Xiamen University) | Yao, Junfeng (Xiamen University)
Reordering model adaptation remains a big challenge in statistical machine translation because reordering patterns of translation units often vary dramatically from one domain to another. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive discriminative reordering model (DRM) based on structural learning, which can capture correspondences among reordering features from two different domains. Exploiting both in-domain and out-of-domain monolingual corpora, our model learns a shared feature representation for cross-domain phrase reordering. Incorporating features of this representation, the DRM trained on out-of-domain corpus generalizes better to in-domain data. Experiment results on the NIST Chinese-English translation task show that our approach significantly outperforms a variety of baselines.
Local Translation Prediction with Global Sentence Representation
Zhang, Jiajun (Chinese Academy of Sciences) | Zhang, Dakun (Toshiba (China) Research and Development Center) | Hao, Jie (Toshiba (China) Research and Development Center)
Statistical machine translation models have made great progress in improving the translation quality. However, the existing models predict the target translation with only the source- and target-side local context information. In practice, distinguishing good translations from bad ones does not only depend on the local features, but also rely on the global sentence-level information. In this paper, we explore the source-side global sentence-level features for target-side local translation prediction. We propose a novel bilingually-constrained chunk-based convolutional neural network to learn sentence semantic representations. With the sentence-level feature representation, we further design a feed-forward neural network to better predict translations using both local and global information. The large-scale experiments show that our method can obtain substantial improvements in translation quality over the strong baseline: the hierarchical phrase-based translation model augmented with the neural network joint model.