Articles

This paper attempts to explore the interrelation between philosophical accounts of language and respective technological developments in the field of human language technologies. In doing so, it focuses on the interaction between analytical philosophy and machine translation development, trying to draw the emerging methodological analogies. 1...

Reordering is a serious challenge in sta- tistical machine translation. We propose a method for analysing syntactic reorder- ing in parallel corpora and apply it to un- derstanding the differences in the perfor- mance of SMT systems. Results at recent large-scale evaluation campaigns show that synchronous grammar-based statisti- cal machine …...

Automatic Machine Translation (MT) evaluation metrics have traditionally been evaluated by the correlation of the scores they assign to MT output with human judgments of translation performance. Different types of human judgments, such as Fluency, Adequacy, and HTER, mea- sure varying aspects of MT performance that can be captured by …...

Linguistic metrics based on syntactic and semantic information have proven very effective for Automatic MT Evaluation. However, no results have been presented so far on their performance when applied to heavily ill-formed low quality transla- tions. In order to glean some light into this issue, in this work we present …...

The most commonly used method for training feature weights in statistical ma- chine translation (SMT) systems is Och’s minimum error rate training (MERT) pro- cedure. A well-known problem with Och’s procedure is that it tends to be sensitive to small changes in the system, particu- larly when the number of …...

In this paper we present a novel translit- eration technique which is based on deep belief networks. Common approaches use finite state machines or other meth- ods similar to conventional machine trans- lation. Instead of using conventional NLP techniques, the approach presented here builds on deep belief networks, a tech- …...

Translation systems are complex, and most metrics do little to pinpoint causes of error or isolate system differences. We use a simple technique to discover induction errors, which occur when good transla- tions are absent from model search spaces. Our results show that a common prun- ing heuristic drastically increases …...

Linking constructions involving � (DE) are ubiq- uitous in Chinese, and can be translated into En- glish in many different ways. This is a major source of machine translation error, even when syntax- sensitive translation models are used. This paper explores how getting more information about the syntactic, semantic, and …...

In this paper we describe a new approach to model long-range word reorderings in statistical machine translation (SMT). Un- til now, most SMT approaches are only able to model local reorderings. But even the word order of related languages like German and English can be very different. In recent years …...

Chinese and Korean belong to different lan- guage families in terms of word-order and morphological typology. Chinese is an SVO and morphologically poor language while Ko- rean is an SOV and morphologically rich one. In Chinese-to-Korean SMT systems, systemat- ic differences between the verbal systems of the two languages make …...

We present a comparison of two approaches for Arabic-Chinese machine translation using Eng- lish as a pivot language: sentence pivoting and phrase-table pivoting. Our results show that using English as a pivot in either approach out- performs direct translation from Arabic to Chi- nese. Our best result is the phrase-pivot …...

Edinburgh University participated in the WMT 2009 shared task using the Moses phrase-based statistical machine transla- tion decoder, building systems for all lan- guage pairs. The system configuration was identical for all language pairs (with a few additional components for the German- English language pairs). This paper de- scribes the …...

In this article, we describe the machine translation systems we used to create MorphoLogic’s submissions to the WMT09 shared Hungarian to English and English to Hungarian shared transla- tion tasks. We used our rule based MetaMorpho system to generate our pri- mary submission. In addition, we created a hybrid system …...

We describe the system used in our sub- mission to the WMT-2009 French-English translation task. We use the Moses phrase- based Statistical Machine Translation sys- tem with two simple modications of the decoding input and word-alignment strat- egy based on morphology, and analyze their impact on translation quality. 1...

This paper describes the techniques we explored to improve the translation of news text in the German-English and Hungarian-English tracks of the WMT09 shared translation task. Beginning with a convention hierarchical phrase-based sys- tem, we found benefits for using word seg- mentation lattices as input, explicit gen- eration of beginning …...

This paper presents the Carnegie Mellon University statistical transfer MT system submitted to the 2009 WMT shared task in French-to-English translation. We de- scribe a syntax-based approach that incor- porates both syntactic and non-syntactic phrase pairs in addition to a syntactic grammar. After reporting development test results, we conduct a …...

We describe Joshua, an open source toolkit for statistical machine transla- tion. Joshua implements all of the algo- rithms required for synchronous context free grammars (SCFGs): chart-parsing, n- gram language model integration, beam- and cube-pruning, and k-best extraction. The toolkit also implements suffix-array grammar extraction and minimum error rate training. …...

This paper presents our first attempt at con- structing a Vietnamese-French statistical machine translation system. Since Vietnam- ese is an under-resourced language, we con- centrate on building a large Vietnamese- French parallel corpus. A document align- ment method based on publication date, spe- cial words and sentence alignment result is …...

This paper describes the development of several machine translation systems for the 2009 WMT shared task evaluation. We only consider the translation between French and English. We describe a sta- tistical system based on the Moses de- coder and a statistical post-editing sys- tem using SYSTRAN’s rule-based system. We also …...

We describe two systems for English-to- Czech machine translation that took part in the WMT09 translation task. One of the systems is a tuned phrase-based system and the other one is based on a linguisti- cally motivated analysis-transfer-synthesis approach. 1...