This paper describes a method that successfully exploits simple syntactic features for n-best translation candidate reranking using perceptrons. Our approach uses discriminative language modelling to rerank the n-best translations generated by a statistical machine translation system. The performance is evaluated for Arabic-to-English translation using NIST’s MT-Eval benchmarks. Whilst parse trees do not consistently help, we show how features extracted from a simple Part-of-Speech annotation layer outperform two competitive baselines, leading to significant BLEU improvements on three different test sets.

We present a novel exact solution to the approximate string matching problem in the context of translation memories, where a text segment has to be matched against a large corpus, while allowing for errors. We use suffix arrays to detect exact n-gram matches, A* search heuristics to discard matches and A* parsing to validate candidate segments. The method outperforms the canonical baseline by a factor of 100, with average lookup times of 4.3–247ms for a segment in a realistic scenario.

We describe an effort to improve standard reference-based metrics for Machine Translation (MT) evaluation by enriching them with Confidence Estimation (CE) features and using a learning mechanism trained on human annotations. Reference-based MT evaluation metrics compare the system output against reference translations looking for overlaps at different levels (lexical, syntactic, and semantic). These metrics aim at comparing MT systems or analyzing the progress of a given system and are known to have reasonably good correlation with human judgments at the corpus level, but not at the segment level. CE metrics, on the other hand, target the system in use, providing a quality score to the end-user for each translated segment. They cannot rely on reference translations, and use instead information extracted from the input text, system output and possibly external corpora to train machine learning algorithms. These metrics correlate better with human judgments at the segment level. However, they are usually highly biased by difficulty level of the input segment, and therefore are less appropriate for comparing multiple systems translating the same input segments. We show that these two classes of metrics are complementary and can be combined to provide MT evaluation metrics that achieve higher correlation with human judgments at the segment level.

Morphologically rich languages pose a challenge for statistical machine translation (SMT). This challenge is magnified when translating into a morphologically rich language. In this work we address this challenge in the framework of a broad-coverage English-to-Arabic phrase based statistical machine translation (PBSMT). We explore the full spectrum of Arabic segmentation schemes ranging from full word form to fully segmented forms and examine the effects on system performance. Our results show a difference of 2.61 BLEU points between the best and worst segmentation schemes indicating that the choice of the segmentation scheme has a significant effect on the performance of a PBSMT system in a large data scenario. We also show that a simple segmentation scheme can perform as good as the best and more complicated segmentation scheme. We also report results on a wide set of techniques for recombining the segmented Arabic output.

In this paper, we describe an extension to a hybrid machine translation system for handling dialect Arabic, using a decoding algorithm to normalize non-standard, spontaneous and dialectal Arabic into Modern Standard Arabic. We prove the feasibility of the approach by measuring and comparing machine translation results in terms of BLEU with and without the proposed approach. We show in our tests that on real-live broadcast input with transcriptions of dialectal speech we achieve an increase on BLEU of about 1%, and on web content with dialect text of about 2%.

In this paper, we present the insights gained from a detailed study of coupling a highly modular English-Hindi RBMT system with a standard phrase-based SMT system. Coupling the RBMT and SMT systems at various stages in the RBMT pipeline, we observe the effects of the source transformations at each stage on the performance of the coupled MT system. We propose an architecture that systematically exploits the structural transfer and robust generation capabilities of the RBMT system. Working with the English-Hindi language pair, we show that the coupling configurations explored in our experiments help address different aspects of the typological divergence between these languages. In spite of working with very small datasets, we report significant improvements both in terms of BLEU (7.14 and 0.87 over the RBMT and the SMT baselines respectively) and subjective evaluation (relative decrease of 17% in SSER).

We describe a unified and coherent syntactic framework for supporting a semantically-informed syntactic approach to statistical machine translation. Semantically enriched syntactic tags assigned to the target-language training texts improved translation quality. The resulting system significantly outperformed a linguistically naive baseline model (Hiero), and reached the highest scores yet reported on the NIST 2009 Urdu-English translation task. This finding supports the hypothesis (posed by many researchers in the MT community, e.g., in DARPA GALE) that both syntactic and semantic information are critical for improving translation quality—and further demonstrates that large gains can be achieved for low-resource languages with different word order than English.

In this work we review and compare three additional syntactic enhancements for the hierarchical phrase-based translation model, which have been presented in the last few years. We compare their performance when applied separately and study whether the combination may yield additional improvements. Our findings show that the models are complementary, and their combination achieve an increase of 1% in BLEU and a reduction of nearly 2% in TER. The models presented in this work are made available as part of the Jane open source machine translation toolkit.

TER-Plus (TERp) is an extended TER evaluation metric incorporating morphology, synonymy and paraphrases. There are three new edit operations in TERp: Stem Matches, Synonym Matches and Phrase Substitutions (Paraphrases). In this paper, we propose a TERp-based augmented system combination in terms of the backbone selection and consensus decoding network. Combining the new properties of the TERp, we also propose a two-pass decoding strategy for the lattice-based phrase-level confusion network (CN) to generate the final result. The experiments conducted on the NIST2008 Chinese-to-English test set show that our TERp-based augmented system combination framework achieves significant improvements in terms of BLEU and TERp scores compared to the state-of-the-art word-level system combination framework and a TER-based combination strategy.

Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) f-structures (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982) have attracted some attention in recent years as an intermediate data representation for statistical machine translation. So far, however, there are no alignment tools capable of aligning f-structures directly, and plain word alignment is used for this purpose. In this way no use is made of the structural information contained in f-structures. We present the first version of a specialized f-structure alignment open-source software.

In this paper, we present a novel approach to incorporate source-side syntactic reordering patterns into phrase-based SMT. The main contribution of this work is to use the lattice scoring approach to exploit and utilize reordering information that is favoured by the baseline PBSMT system. By referring to the parse trees of the training corpus, we represent the observed reorderings with source-side syntactic patterns. The extracted patterns are then used to convert the parsed inputs into word lattices, which contain both the original source sentences and their potential reorderings. Weights of the word lattices are estimated from the observations of the syntactic reordering patterns in the training corpus. Finally, the PBSMT system is tuned and tested on the generated word lattices to show the benefits of adding potential source-side reorderings in the inputs. We confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed method on a medium-sized corpus for Chinese-English machine translation task. Our method outperformed the baseline system by 1.67% relative on a randomly selected testset and 8.56% relative on the NIST 2008 testset in terms of BLEU score.

Much of the previous work on transliteration has depended on resources and attributes specific to particular language pairs. In this work, rather than focus on a single language pair, we create robust models for transliterating from all languages in a large, diverse set to English. We create training data for 150 languages by mining name pairs from Wikipedia. We train 13 systems and analyze the effects of the amount of training data on transliteration performance. We also present an analysis of the types of errors that the systems make. Our analyses are particularly valuable for building machine translation systems for low resource languages, where creating and integrating a transliteration module for a language with few NLP resources may provide substantial gains in translation performance.

We introduce a method for learning to translate out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. The method focuses on combining sublexical/constituent translations of an OOV to generate its translation candidates. In our approach, wild-card searches are formulated based on our OOV analysis, aimed at maximizing the probability of retrieving OOVs’ sublexical translations from existing resource of machine translation (MT) systems. At run-time, translation candidates of the unknown words are generated from their suitable sublexical translations and ranked based on monolingual and bilingual information. We have incorporated the OOV model into a state-of-the-art MT system and experimental results show that our model indeed helps to ease the negative impact of OOVs on translation quality, especially for sentences containing more OOVs (significant improvement).

The performance of current sentence alignment tools varies according to the to-be-aligned texts. We have found existing tools unsuitable for hard-to-align parallel texts and describe an alternative alignment algorithm. The basic idea is to use machine translations of a text and BLEU as a similarity score to find reliable alignments which are used as anchor points. The gaps between these anchor points are then filled using BLEU-based and length-based heuristics. We show that this approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in our alignment task, and that this improvement in alignment quality translates into better SMT performance. Furthermore, we show that even length-based alignment algorithms profit from having a machine translation as a point of comparison.

This paper suggests a method for detecting cross-lingual semantic similarity using parallel PropBanks. We begin by improving word alignments for verb predicates generated by GIZA++ by using information available in parallel PropBanks. We applied the Kuhn-Munkres method to measure predicate-argument matching and improved verb predicate alignments by an F-score of 12.6%. Using the enhanced word alignments we checked the set of target verbs aligned to a specific source verb for semantic consistency. For a set of English verbs aligned to a Chinese verb, we checked if the English verbs belong to the same semantic class using an existing lexical database, WordNet. For a set of Chinese verbs aligned to an English verb we manually checked semantic similarity between the Chinese verbs within a set. Our results show that the verb sets we generated have a high correlation with semantic classes. This could potentially lead to an automatic technique for generating semantic classes for verbs.

This paper presents a set of experiments on Domain Adaptation of Statistical Machine Translation systems. The experiments focus on Chinese-English and two domain-specific corpora. The paper presents a novel approach for combining multiple domain-trained translation models to achieve improved translation quality for both domain-specific as well as combined sets of sentences. We train a statistical classifier to classify sentences according to the appropriate domain and utilize the corresponding domain-specific MT models to translate them. Experimental results show that the method achieves a statistically significant absolute improvement of 1.58 BLEU (2.86% relative improvement) score over a translation model trained on combined data, and considerable improvements over a model using multiple decoding paths of the Moses decoder, for the combined domain test set. Furthermore, even for domain-specific test sets, our approach works almost as well as dedicated domain-specific models and perfect classification.

This paper investigates varying the decoder weight of the language model (LM) when translating different parts of a sentence. We determine the condition under which the LM weight should be adapted. We find that a better translation can be achieved by varying the LM weight when decoding the most problematic spot in a sentence, which we refer to as a difficult segment. Two adaptation strategies are proposed and compared through experiments. We find that adapting a different LM weight for every difficult segment resulted in the largest improvement in translation quality.

The quality of statistical machine translation systems depends on the quality of the word alignments that are computed during the translation model training phase. IBM alignment models, as implemented in the GIZA++ toolkit, constitute the de facto standard for performing these computations. The resulting alignments and translation models are however very noisy, and several authors have tried to improve them. In this work, we propose a simple and effective approach, which considers alignment as a series of independent binary classification problems in the alignment matrix. Through extensive feature engineering and the use of stacking techniques, we were able to obtain alignments much closer to manually defined references than those obtained by the IBM models. These alignments also yield better translation models, delivering improved performance in a large scale Arabic to English translation task.

With the steadily increasing demand for high-quality translation, the localisation industry is constantly searching for technologies that would increase translator throughput, in particular focusing on the use of high-quality Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) supplementing the established Translation Memory (TM) technology. In this paper, we present a novel modular approach that utilises state-of-the-art sub-tree alignment and SMT techniques to turn the fuzzy matches from a TM into near-perfect translations. Rather than relegate SMT to a last-resort status where it is only used should the TM system fail to produce the desired output, for us SMT is an integral part of the translation process that we rely on to obtain high-quality results. We show that the presented system consistently produces better-quality output than the TM and performs on par or better than the standalone SMT system.

This paper examines the motivation, design, and practical results of several types of human evaluation tasks for machine translation. In addition to considering annotator performance and task informativeness over multiple evaluations, we explore the practicality of tuning automatic evaluation metrics to each judgment type in a comprehensive experiment using the METEOR-NEXT metric. We present results showing clear advantages of tuning to certain types of judgments and discuss causes of inconsistency when tuning to various judgment data, as well as sources of difficulty in the human evaluation tasks themselves.

A method is presented for incremental re-training of an SMT system, in which a local phrase table is created and incrementally updated as a file is translated and post-edited. It is shown that translation data from within the same file has higher value than other domain-specific data. In two technical domains, within-file data increases BLEU score by several full points. Furthermore, a strong recency effect is documented; nearby data within the file has greater value than more distant data. It is also shown that the value of translation data is strongly correlated with a metric defined over new occurrences of n-grams. Finally, it is argued that the incremental re-training prototype could serve as the basis for a practical system which could be interactively updated in real time in a post-editing setting. Based on the results here, such an interactive system has the potential to dramatically improve translation quality.

We propose a source-side decoding sequence language model for phrase-based statistical machine translation. This model is a reordering model in the sense that it helps the decoder find the correct decoding sequence. The model uses word-aligned bilingual training data. We show improved translation quality of up to 1.34% BLEU and 0.54% TER using this model compared to three other widely used reordering models.

Statistical machine translation (SMT) models have recently begun to include source context modeling, under the assumption that the proper lexical choice of the translation for an ambiguous word can be determined from the context in which it appears. Various types of lexical and syntactic features have been explored as effective source context to improve phrase selection in SMT. In the present work, we introduce lexico-syntactic descriptions in the form of supertags as source-side context features in the state-of-the-art hierarchical phrase-based SMT (HPB) model. These features enable us to exploit source similarity in addition to target similarity, as modelled by the language model. In our experiments two kinds of supertags are employed: those from lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar (LTAG) and combinatory categorial grammar (CCG). We use a memory-based classification framework that enables the efficient estimation of these features. Despite the differences between the two supertagging approaches, they give similar improvements. We evaluate the performance of our approach on an English-to-Dutch translation task, and report statistically significant improvements of 4.48% and 6.3% BLEU scores in translation quality when adding CCG and LTAG supertags, respectively, as context-informed features.

Machine Translation traditionally treats documents as sets of independent sentences. In many genres, however, documents are highly structured, and their structure contains information that can be used to improve translation quality. We present a preliminary approach to document translation that uses structural features to modify the behaviour of a language model, at sentence-level granularity. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to incorporate structural information into statistical MT. In experiments on structured English/French documents from the Hansard corpus, we demonstrate small but statistically significant improvements.

In the hierarchical phrase based (HPB) translation model, in addition to hierarchical phrase pairs extracted from bi-text, glue rules are used to perform serial combination of phrases. However, this basic method for combining phrases is not sufficient for phrase reordering. In this paper, we extend the HPB model with maximum entropy based bracketing transduction grammar (BTG), which provides content-dependent combination of neighboring phrases in two ways: serial or inverse. Experimental results show that the extended HPB system achieves absolute improvements of 0.9∼1.8 BLEU points over the baseline for large-scale translation tasks.

Since most Korean postpositions signal grammatical functions such as syntactic relations, generation of incorrect Korean post-positions results in producing ungrammatical outputs in machine translations targeting Korean. Chinese and Korean belong to morphosyntactically divergent language pairs, and usually Korean postpositions do not have their counterparts in Chinese. In this paper, we propose a preprocessing method for a statistical MT system that generates more adequate Korean postpositions. We transfer syntactic relations of subject-verb-object patterns in Chinese sentences and enrich them with transferred syntactic relations in order to reduce the morpho-syntactic differences. The effectiveness of our proposed method is measured with lexical units of various granularities. Human evaluation also suggest improvements over previous methods, which are consistent with the result of the automatic evaluation.

We report findings from a user study with professional post-editors using a translation recommendation framework (He et al., 2010) to integrate Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) output with Translation Memory (TM) systems. The framework recommends SMT outputs to a TM user when it predicts that SMT outputs are more suitable for post-editing than the hits provided by the TM. We analyze the effectiveness of the model as well as the reaction of potential users. Based on the performance statistics and the users’ comments, we find that translation recommendation can reduce the workload of professional post-editors and improve the acceptance of MT in the localization industry.

Although the scoring features of state-of-the-art Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PB-SMT) models are weighted so as to optimise an objective function measuring translation quality, the estimation of the features themselves does not have any relation to such quality metrics. In this paper, we introduce a translation quality-based feature to PB-SMT in a bid to improve the translation quality of the system. Our feature is estimated by averaging the edit-distance between phrase pairs involved in the translation of oracle sentences, chosen by automatic evaluation metrics from the N-best outputs of a baseline system, and phrase pairs occurring in the N-best list. Using our method, we report a statistically significant 2.11% relative improvement in BLEU score for the WMT 2009 Spanish-to-English translation task. We also report that using our method we can achieve statistically significant improvements over the baseline using many other MT evaluation metrics, and a substantial increase in speed and reduction in memory use (due to a reduction in phrase-table size of 87%) while maintaining significant gains in translation quality.

In this paper, we propose a novel model for scoring reordering in phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) and successfully use it for translation from Farsi into English and Arabic. The model replaces the distance-based distortion model that is widely used in most SMT systems. The main idea of the model is to penalize each new deviation from the monotonic translation path. We also propose a way for combining this model with manually created reordering rules for Farsi which try to alleviate the difference in sentence structure between Farsi and English/Arabic by changing the position of the verb. The rules are used in the SMT search as soft constraints. In the experiments on two general-domain translation tasks, the proposed penalty-based model improves the BLEU score by up to 1.5% absolute as compared to the baseline of monotonic translation, and up to 1.2% as compared to using the distance-based distortion model.

We propose a Chinese dependency tree reordering method for Chinese-to-Korean SMT systems through analyzing systematic differences between the Chinese and Korean languages. Translating predicate-predicate patterns in Chinese into Korean raises various issues such as long-distance reordering. This paper concentrates on syntactic reordering of predicate-predicate patterns in Chinese dependency trees through contrastively analyzing construction types in Chinese and their corresponding translations in Korean. We explore useful linguistic knowledge that assists effective syntactic reordering of Chinese dependency trees; we design two experiments with different kinds of linguistic knowledge combined with the phrase and hierarchical phrase-based SMT systems, and assess the effectiveness of our proposed methods. The experiments achieved significant improvements by resolving the long-distance reordering problem.

We present a conditional-random-field approach to discriminatively-trained phrase-based machine translation in which training and decoding are both cast in a sampling framework and are implemented uniformly in a new probabilistic programming language for factor graphs. In traditional phrase-based translation, decoding infers both a "Viterbi" alignment and the target sentence. In contrast, in our approach, a rich overlapping-phrase alignment is produced by a fast deterministic method, while probabilistic decoding infers only the target sentence, which is then able to leverage arbitrary features of the entire source sentence, target sentence and alignment. By using SampleRank for learning we could in principle efficiently estimate hundreds of thousands of parameters. Test-time decoding is done by MCMC sampling with annealing. To demonstrate the potential of our approach we show preliminary experiments leveraging alignments that may contain overlapping bi-phrases.

In this work we give a detailed comparison of the impact of the integration of discriminative and trigger-based lexicon models in state-of-the-art hierarchical and conventional phrase-based statistical machine translation systems. As both types of extended lexicon models can grow very large, we apply certain restrictions to discard some of the less useful information. We show how these restrictions facilitate the training of the extended lexicon models. We finally evaluate systems that incorporate both types of models with different restrictions on a large-scale translation task for the Arabic-English language pair. Our results suggest that extended lexicon models can be substantially reduced in size while still giving clear improvements in translation performance.

This paper describes successful applications of discriminative lexicon models to the statistical machine translation (SMT) systems into morphologically complex languages. We extend the previous work on discriminatively trained lexicon models to include more contextual information in making lexical selection decisions by building a single global log-linear model of translation selection. In offline experiments, we show that the use of the expanded contextual information, including morphological and syntactic features, help better predict words in three target languages with complex morphology (Bulgarian, Czech and Korean). We also show that these improved lexical prediction models make a positive impact in the end-to-end SMT scenario from English to these languages.

System combination exploits differences between machine translation systems to form a combined translation from several system outputs. Core to this process are features that reward n-gram matches between a candidate combination and each system output. Systems differ in performance at the n-gram level despite similar overall scores. We therefore advocate a new feature formulation: for each system and each small n, a feature counts n-gram matches between the system and candidate. We show post-evaluation improvement of 6.67 BLEU over the best system on NIST MT09 Arabic-English test data. Compared to a baseline system combination scheme from WMT 2009, we show improvement in the range of 1 BLEU point.

Paraphrase generation is useful for various NLP tasks. But pivoting techniques for paraphrasing have limited applicability due to their reliance on parallel texts, although they benefit from linguistic knowledge implicit in the sentence alignment. Distributional paraphrasing has wider applicability, but doesn’t benefit from any linguistic knowledge. We combine a distributional semantic distance measure (based on a non-annotated corpus) with a shallow linguistic resource to create a hybrid semantic distance measure of words, which we extend to phrases. We embed this extended hybrid measure in a distributional paraphrasing technique, benefiting from both linguistic knowledge and independence from parallel texts. Evaluated in statistical machine translation tasks by augmenting translation models with paraphrase-based translation rules, we show our novel technique is superior to the non-augmented baseline and both the distributional and pivot paraphrasing techniques. We train models on both a full-size dataset as well as a simulated “low density” small dataset.