Articles

Modern statistical machine translation sys- tems may be seen as using two components: feature extraction, that summarizes informa- tion about the translation, and a log-linear framework to combine features. In this pa- per, we propose to relax the linearity con- straints on the combination, and hence relax- ing constraints of …...

We propose a novel syntax-based model for statistical machine translation in which meta-structure (MS) and meta-structure se- quence (SMS) of a parse tree are defined. In this framework, a parse tree is decom- posed into SMS to deal with the structure divergence and the alignment can be recon- structed at …...

In order to simultaneously translate speech into multiple languages an extension of stochastic finite-state transducers is pro- posed. In this approach the speech trans- lation model consists of a single network where acoustic models (in the input) and the multilingual model (in the output) are em- bedded. The multi-target model …...

This paper describes a novel model using dependency structures on the source side for syntax-based statistical machine transla- tion: Dependency Treelet String Correspon- dence Model (DTSC). The DTSC model maps source dependency structures to tar- get strings. In this model translation pairs of source treelets and target strings with their …...

We investigate different representational granularities for sub-lexical representation in statistical machine translation work from English to Turkish. We find that (i) rep- resenting both Turkish and English at the morpheme-level but with some selective morpheme-grouping on the Turkish side of the training data, (ii) augmenting the train- ing data with …...

Combinatorial Categorial Grammar (CCG) supertags present phrase-based machine translation with an opportunity to access rich syntactic information at a word level. The challenge is incorporating this informa- tion into the translation process. Factored translation models allow the inclusion of su- pertags as a factor in the source or target lan- …...

Today's statistical machine translation systems generalize poorly to new domains. Even small shifts can cause precipitous drops in translation quality. Phrasal systems rely heavily, for both reordering and contextual translation, on long phrases that simply fail to match out- of-domain text. Hierarchical systems attempt to generalize these phrases but their …...

Current statistical machine translation sys- tems handle the translation process as the transformation of a string of symbols into another string of symbols. Normally the symbols dealt with are the words in differ- ent languages, sometimes with some addi- tional information included, like morpho- logical data. In this work we …...

We provide an in-depth analysis of the in- tegration of an Arabic-to-English translit- eration system into a general-purpose phrase-based statistical machine translation system. We study the integration from dif- ferent aspects and evaluate the improve- ment that can be attributed to the integra- tion using the BLEU metric. Our experi- …...

CCGbank is an automatic conversion of the Penn Treebank to Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). We present two exten- sions to CCGbank which involve manipu- lating its derivation and category structure. We discuss approaches for the automatic re-insertion of removed quote symbols and evaluate their impact on the performance of the …...

Morphological analysis is often used during preprocessing in Statistical Machine Trans- lation. Existing work suggests that the bene- fit would be greater for more highly inflected languages, although to our knowledge this has not been systematically tested on lan- guages with comparable morphology. In this paper, two comparable languages with …...

This paper proposes a method for automati- cally sense-to-sense aligning dictionaries in different languages (focusing on Japanese and English), based on structural data in the respective dictionaries. The basis of the proposed method is sentence similarity of the sense definition sentences, using a bilingual Japanese-to-English dictionary as a pivot during …...

The utility of syntactic dependencies in computing distributional similarity has not yet been fully investigated. Most re- search based on syntactically conditioned co-occurrences simply ignores the sali- ence of grammatical relations and effec- tively merges syntactic dependencies into one ‘context’. Through calculating distri- butional similarity, we design two ex- periments …...

Most existing systems for automatically extracting lexical-semantic resources ne- glect multi-word expressions (MWEs), even though approximately 30% of gold-standard thesauri entries are MWEs. We present a distributional similarity system that identifies synonyms for MWEs. We ex- tend Grefenstette’s SEXTANT shallow parser to first identify bigram MWEs using colloca- tion statistics …...

Collins’ widely-used parsing models treat noun phrases (NPs) in a different manner to other constituents. We investigate these differences, using the recently released in- ternal NP bracketing data (Vadas and Cur- ran, 2007a). Altering the structure of the Treebank, as this data does, has a num- ber of consequences, as …...

Abbreviations are commonly found in- stances of synonymy in Biomedical journal papers. Information retrieval systems that index paragraphs rather than full-text arti- cles are more susceptible to term variation of this kind, since abbreviations are typi- cally only defined once at the beginning of the text. One solution to this …...

This paper proposes the use of a language representation that specifies the relationship between terms of a sentence using question words. The proposed representation is tai- lored to help the search for documents con- taining an answer for a natural language question. This study presents the construc- tion of this …...

Question answering on speech transcripts (QAst) is a pilot track of the CLEF com- petition. In this paper we present our con- tribution to QAst, which is centred on a study of Named Entity (NE) recognition on speech transcripts, and how it impacts on the accuracy of the final question …...

Mutual Exclusion Bootstrapping (MEB) was designed to overcome the problem of se- mantic drift suffered by iterative bootstrap- ping, where the meaning of extracted terms quickly drifts from the original seed terms (Curran et al., 2007). MEB works by ex- tracting mutually exclusive classes in paral- lel which constrain each …...

This paper investigates the task of noun compound interpretation, building on the sense collocation approach proposed by Moldovan et al. (2004). Our primary task is to evaluate the impact of similar words on the sense collocation method, and decrease the sensitivity of the classifiers by expanding the range of sense …...