Articles

In this paper we describe how we mine in- teractions between a human guide and a human visitor to build a virtual guide. A virtual guide is an agent capable of fulfill- ing the role of a human guide. Its goal is to guide visitors to each booth of a …...

In this paper we describe a method for developing a virtual instructor for pedes- trian navigation based on real interactions between a human instructor and a human pedestrian. A virtual instructor is an agent capable of fulfilling the role of a human instructor, and its goal is to assist a …...

We present an analysis of a Pedestrian Navigation and Information dialogue cor- pus collected using a Wizard-of-Oz inter- face. We analysed how wizards preferred to communicate to users given three differ- ent options: preset buttons that can gen- erate an utterance, sequences of buttons and dropdown lists to construct complex …...

Accurate dialog state tracking is crucial for the design of an efficient spoken dialog system. Until recently, quantitative com- parison of different state tracking meth- ods was difficult. However the 2013 Dia- log State Tracking Challenge (DSTC) in- troduced a common dataset and metrics that allow to evaluate the performance …...

Mobile Internet access via smartphones puts demands on in-car infotainment sys- tems, as more and more drivers like to ac- cess the Internet while driving. Spoken dialog systems support the user by less distracting interaction than visual/haptic- based dialog systems. To develop an intu- itive and usable spoken dialog system, …...

German particle verbs, like anblicken (to gaze at) combine a base verb (blicken) with a particle (an) to form a special kind of Multi Word Expression. Parti- cle verbs may share the semantics of the base verb and the particle to a variable de- gree. However, while syntactic subcate- gorization …...

Sometimes modifiers have a strong effect on core aspects of the meaning of the nouns they are attached to: A parrot is a desirable pet, but a dead parrot is, at the very least, a rather unusual household companion. In order to stimulate compu- tational research into the impact of …...

The efficacy of discriminative training in Statistical Machine Translation is heavily dependent on the quality of the develop- ment corpus used, and on its similarity to the test set. This paper introduces a novel development corpus selection algo- rithm – the LA selection algorithm. It fo- cuses on the selection …...

Domain adaptation for statistical machine translation is the task of altering general models to improve performance on the test domain. In this work, we suggest several novel weighting schemes based on trans- lation models for adapted phrase extrac- tion. To calculate the weights, we first phrase align the general bilingual …...

When applying interactive translation pre- diction in real-life scenarios, response time is critical for the users to accept the in- teractive translation prediction system as a potentially useful tool. In this paper, we report on three different strategies for re- ducing the computation time required by a state-of-the-art interactive translation …...

Current Translation Memory (TM) sys- tems work at the surface level and lack se- mantic knowledge while matching. This paper presents an approach to incorpo- rating semantic knowledge in the form of paraphrasing in matching and retrieval. Most of the TMs use Levenshtein edit- distance or some variation of it. …...

During decoding, the Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) decoder travels over all complete paths on the Search Graph (SG), seeks those with cheapest costs and back- tracks to read off the best translations. Al- though these winners beat the rest in model scores, there is no certain guarantee that they have …...

We describe experiments on quality esti- mation to select the best translation among multiple options for a given source sen- tence. We consider a realistic and chal- lenging setting where the translation sys- tems used are unknown, and no relative quality assessments are available for the training of prediction models. …...

Predicting the quality of machine trans- lations is a challenging topic. Quality estimation (QE) of translations is based on features of the source and target texts (without the need for human references), and on supervised machine learning meth- ods to build prediction models. Engineer- ing well-performing features is therefore crucial …...

As a multilingual vendor, we have access to machine translation (MT) scoring and other evaluation data on a wide range of language combinations and content types; we also have experience with different MT systems in production. Our daily work involves the collaboration with a wide spectrum of translation partners, from …...

Typing has traditionally been the only in- put method used by human translators working with computer-assisted transla- tion (CAT) tools. However, speech is a nat- ural communication channel for humans and, in principle, it should be faster and easier than typing from a keyboard. This contribution investigates the integration of …...

In this paper we improve Urdu→Hindi⇄English machine trans- lation through triangulation and translit- eration. First we built an Urdu→Hindi SMT system by inducing triangulated and transliterated phrase-tables from Urdu–English and Hindi–English phrase translation models. We then use it to trans- late the Urdu part of the Urdu-English parallel data into …...

An important step in mainstream statisti- cal machine translation (SMT) is combin- ing bidirectional alignments into one align- ment model. This process is called sym- metrization. Most of the symmetrization heuristics and models are focused on di- rect translation (source-to-target). In this paper, we present symmetrization heuristic relaxation to improve …...

AbstractA novel variation of modified KNESER-NEY model using monomial discounting is presented and integrated into the MOSES statistical machine translation toolkit. The language model is trained on a large training set as usual, but its new discount parameters are tuned to the small development set. An in-domain and cross-domain evaluation …...

AbstractWe present a machine translation engine that can translate romanized Arabic, often known as Arabizi, into English. With such a system we can, for the first time, translate the massive amounts of Arabizi that are generated every day in the social media sphere but until now have been uninterpretable by …...