Articles

The aim is to develop an interactive and iterative translation system able to adapt and improve itself rapidly using user’s feedbacks (collected as translation post- editions). We present a preliminary study in which three methods for integrating feedbacks are tested. The results show that, despite the difficulty to measure the …...

This paper describes the design, develop- ment and evaluation of a machine transla- tion system between Dutch and Afrikaans developed over a period of around a month and a half. The system relies heavily on the re-use of existing publically available resources such as Wiktionary, Wikipedia and the Apertium machine …...

This paper describes a cognate identifica- tion method, used by a lexical alignment system for French and Romanian. We combine statistical techniques and lin- guistic information to extract cognates from lemmatized, tagged and sentence- aligned parallel corpora. We evaluate the cognate identification model and we compare it to other methods …...

This paper describes a method to effi- ciently leverage Brazilian Portuguese re- sources as European Portuguese resources. Brazilian Portuguese and European Por- tuguese are two Portuguese varieties very close and usually mutually intelligible, but with several known differences, which are studied in this work. Based on this study, we derived …...

We present a novel strategy to derive new translation units using an additional bilin- gual corpus and a previously trained SMT system. The units were used to adapt the SMT system. The derivation process can be applied when the additional corpus is very small compared with the original train corpus …...

Translation results suffer when a standard phrase-based statistical machine transla- tion system is used for translating long sen- tences. The translation output will not pre- serve the same word order as the source, especially between a language pair that has different syntactic structures. When a sentence is long, it should …...

This paper describes a novel approach aimed to identify a priori which subset of machine translation (MT) systems among a known set will produce the most reliable translations for a given source-language (SL) sentence. We aim to select this sub- set of MT systems by using only informa- tion extracted …...

Extending phrase-based Statistical Ma- chine Translation systems with a second, dynamic phrase table has been done for multiple purposes. Promising results have been reported for hybrid or multi-engine machine translation, i.e. building a phrase table from the knowledge of external MT systems, and for online learning. We argue that, in …...

With the noticeable improvement in the overall quality of Machine Translation (MT) systems in recent years, post-editing of MT output is starting to become a com- mon practice among human translators. However, it is well known that the qual- ity of a given MT system can vary sig- nificantly across …...

This paper presents a webservice archi- tecture for Statistical Machine Translation aimed at non-technical users. A workflow editor allows a user to combine different webservices using a graphical user inter- face. In the current state of this project, the webservices have been implemented for a range of sentential and sub-sentential …...

This paper explores a new method to im- prove computer-aided translation (CAT) systems based on translation memory (TM) by using pre-computed word alignments be- tween the source and target segments in the translation units (TUs) of the user’s TM. When a new segment is to be translated by the CAT …...

In extant phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) systems, the transla- tion model relies on word-to-word align- ments, which serve as constraints for the subsequent heuristic extraction and scor- ing processes. Word alignments are usu- ally inferred in a probabilistic framework; yet, only one single best alignment is re- tained, as …...

This paper reports on the ongoing work fo- cused on domain adaptation of statistical machine translation using domain-specific data obtained by domain-focused web crawling. We present a strategy for crawl- ing monolingual and parallel data and their exploitation for testing, language mod- elling, and system tuning in a phrase- -based …...

The Scandinavian languages have an un- usual structure of definite noun phrases (NPs), with a noun suffix as one possibility of expressing definiteness, which is prob- lematic for statistical machine translation from languages with different NP struc- tures. We show that translation can be im- proved by simple source side …...

In this paper we study several advanced techniques and models for Arabic-to- English statistical machine translation. We examine how the challenges imposed by this particular language pair and transla- tion direction can be successfully tack- led within the framework of hierarchical phrase-based translation. We extend the state-of-the-art with a novel …...

In this paper, we present a method to em- ploy target-side syntactic contextual infor- mation in a Hierarchical Phrase-Based sys- tem. Our method uses Combinatory Cate- gorial Grammar (CCG) to annotate train- ing data with labels that represent the left and right syntactic context of target-side phrases. These labels are …...

Future improvement of machine transla- tion systems requires reliable automatic evaluation and error classification mea- sures to avoid time and money consuming human classification. In this article, we propose a new method for automatic er- ror classification and systematically com- pare its results to those obtained by hu- mans. We …...

Statistical machine translation systems have greatly improved in the last years. However, this boost in performance usu- ally comes at a high computational cost, yielding systems that are often not suitable for integration in hand-held or real-time devices. We describe a novel technique for reducing such cost by performing a …...

This paper describes efforts towards the development of an Arabic to Italian SMT system for the news domain. Since only very little parallel data are available for this language pair, we investigated both the exploitation of comparable corpora and pivot translation. Experimental evaluation was conducted on a new benchmark devel- …...

Modern Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems make their decisions based on multiple information sources, which as- sess various aspects of the match between a source sentence and its possible trans- lation(s). Tuning a SMT system consists in finding the right balance between these sources so as to produce the best …...