Articles

We describe the systems developed by the team of the Qatar Computing Research Insti- tute for the WMT12 Shared Translation Task. We used a phrase-based statistical machine translation model with several non-standard settings, most notably tuning data selection and phrase table combination. The evaluation results show that we rank second …...

We present Joshua 4.0, the newest version of our open-source decoder for parsing-based statistical machine translation. The main con- tributions in this release are the...

This paper describes the joint QUAERO sub- mission to the WMT 2012 machine transla- tion evaluation. Four groups (RWTH Aachen University, Karlsruhe Institute of Technol- ogy, LIMSI-CNRS, and SYSTRAN) of the QUAERO project submitted a joint translation for the WMT German→English task. Each group translated the data sets with their …...

This paper describes the UPC participation in the WMT 12 evaluation campaign. All sys- tems presented are based on standard phrase- based Moses systems. Variations adopted sev- eral improvement techniques such as mor- phology simplification and generation and do- main adaptation. The morphology simpli- fication overcomes the data sparsity prob- …...

We present a variant of phrase-based SMT that uses source-side parsing and a constituent re- ordering model based on word alignments in the word-aligned training corpus to predict hi- erarchical block-wise reordering of the input. Multiple possible translation orders are rep- resented compactly in a source order lattice. This source …...

One of the most notable recent improve- ments of the TectoMT English-to-Czech trans- lation is a systematic and theoretically sup- ported revision of formemes—the annotation of morpho-syntactic features of content words in deep dependency syntactic structures based on the Prague tectogrammatics theory. Our modifications aim at reducing data sparsity, increasing …...

This paper describes the French-English trans- lation system developed by the Avenue re- search group at Carnegie Mellon University for the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Ma- chine Translation (NAACL WMT12). We present a method for training data selection, a description of our hierarchical phrase-based translation system, and a discussion of …...

We introduce a taxonomy of factored phrase- based translation scenarios and conduct a range of experiments in this taxonomy. We point out several common pitfalls when de- signing factored setups. The paper also de- scribes our WMT12 submissions CU-BOJAR and CU-POOR-COMB. 1...

We introduce the first fully automatic, fully seman- tic frame based MT evaluation metric, MEANT, that outperforms all other commonly used auto- matic metrics in correlating with human judgment on translation adequacy. Recent work on HMEANT, which is a human metric, indicates that machine translation can be better evaluated via …...

Statistical phrase-based machine translation requires no linguistic information beyond word-aligned parallel corpora (Zens et al., 2002; Koehn et al., 2003). Unfortunately, this linguistic agnosticism often produces un- grammatical translations. Syntax, or sentence structure, could provide guidance to phrase- based systems, but the “non-constituent” word strings that phrase-based decoders manipu- late …...

Adding syntactic labels to synchronous context-free translation rules can improve performance, but labeling with phrase struc- ture constituents, as in GHKM (Galley et al., 2004), excludes potentially useful translation rules. SAMT (Zollmann and Venugopal, 2006) introduces heuristics to create new non-constituent labels, but these heuristics introduce many complex labels and …...

The addition of a deterministic permutation parser can provide valuable hierarchical in- formation to a phrase-based statistical ma- chine translation (PBSMT) system. Permuta- tion parsers have been used to implement hier- archical re-ordering models (Galley and Man- ning, 2008) and to enforce inversion trans- duction grammar (ITG) constraints (Feng et …...

Confusion network decoding has proven to be one of the most successful approaches to machine translation system combination. The hypothesis alignment algorithm is a cru- cial part of building the confusion networks and many alternatives have been proposed in the literature. This paper describes a sys- tematic comparison of five …...

Post-editing performed by translators is an increasingly common use of machine trans- lated texts. While high quality MT may in- crease productivity, post-editing poor transla- tions can be a frustrating task which requires more effort than translating from scratch. For this reason, estimating whether machine trans- lations are of sufficient …...

We address two challenges for automatic ma- chine translation evaluation: a) avoiding the use of reference translations, and b) focusing on adequacy estimation. From an economic perspective, getting rid of costly hand-crafted reference translations (a) permits to alleviate the main bottleneck in MT evaluation. From a system evaluation perspective, pushing …...

Chiang’s hierarchical phrase-based (HPB) translation model advances the state-of-the-art in statistical machine translation by expanding conventional phrases to hierarchical phrases – phrases that contain sub-phrases. How- ever, the original HPB model is prone to over- generation due to lack of linguistic knowl- edge: the grammar may suggest more deriva- tions …...

This paper describes our work with the data distributed for the WMT’12 Confidence Es- timation shared task. Our contribution is twofold: i) we first present an analysis of the data which highlights the difficulty of the task and motivates our approach; ii) we show that using non-linear models, namely ran- …...

We in this paper describe the regression sys- tem for our participation in the quality estima- tion task of WMT12. This paper focuses on exploiting special phrases, or word sequences, to estimate translation quality. Several feature templates on this topic are put forward sub- sequently. We train a SVM regression …...

We present in this paper the system sub- missions of the SDL Language Weaver team in the WMT 2012 Quality Estimation shared-task. Our MT quality-prediction sys- tems use machine learning techniques (M5P regression-tree and SVM-regression models) and a feature-selection algorithm that has been designed to directly optimize towards the of- …...

We present a method we used for the quality estimation shared task of WMT 2012 involving IBM1 and language model scores calculated on morphemes and POS tags. The IBM1 scores calculated on morphemes and POS-4grams of the source sentence and obtained translation output are shown to be competitive with the …...