scholarly journals Learning to translate with products of novices: a suite of open-ended challenge problems for teaching MT

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 165-178
Author(s):  
Adam Lopez ◽  
Matt Post ◽  
Chris Callison-Burch ◽  
Jonathan Weese ◽  
Juri Ganitkevitch ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Improve Performance ◽  
Complex Subject

Machine translation (MT) draws from several different disciplines, making it a complex subject to teach. There are excellent pedagogical texts, but problems in MT and current algorithms for solving them are best learned by doing. As a centerpiece of our MT course, we devised a series of open-ended challenges for students in which the goal was to improve performance on carefully constrained instances of four key MT tasks: alignment, decoding, evaluation, and reranking. Students brought a diverse set of techniques to the problems, including some novel solutions which performed remarkably well. A surprising and exciting outcome was that student solutions or their combinations fared competitively on some tasks, demonstrating that even newcomers to the field can help improve the state-of-the-art on hard NLP problems while simultaneously learning a great deal. The problems, baseline code, and results are freely available.

scholarly journals Comparative Quality Estimation for Machine Translation Observations on Machine Learning and Features

2017 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 307-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleftherios Avramidis
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Feature Selection ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Linear Method ◽  
The State ◽  
Quality Estimation ◽  
Art Methods ◽  
Improved Performance

AbstractA deeper analysis on Comparative Quality Estimation is presented by extending the state-of-the-art methods with adequacy and grammatical features from other Quality Estimation tasks. The previously used linear method, unable to cope with the augmented features, is replaced with a boosting classifier assisted by feature selection. The methods indicated show improved performance for 6 language pairs, when applied on the output from MT systems developed over 7 years. The improved models compete better with reference-aware metrics.Notable conclusions are reached through the examination of the contribution of the features in the models, whereas it is possible to identify common MT errors that are captured by the features. Many grammatical/fluency features have a good contribution, few adequacy features have some contribution, whereas source complexity features are of no use. The importance of many fluency and adequacy features is language-specific.

scholarly journals Fast and Simple Mixture of Softmaxes with BPE and Hybrid-LightRNN for Language Generation

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 6626-6633
Author(s):  
Xiang Kong ◽  
Qizhe Xie ◽  
Zihang Dai ◽  
Eduard Hovy
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Computational Time ◽  
Memory Consumption ◽  
Image Captioning ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Language Generation ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Coding Schemes

Mixture of Softmaxes (MoS) has been shown to be effective at addressing the expressiveness limitation of Softmax-based models. Despite the known advantage, MoS is practically sealed by its large consumption of memory and computational time due to the need of computing multiple Softmaxes. In this work, we set out to unleash the power of MoS in practical applications by investigating improved word coding schemes, which could effectively reduce the vocabulary size and hence relieve the memory and computation burden. We show both BPE and our proposed Hybrid-LightRNN lead to improved encoding mechanisms that can halve the time and memory consumption of MoS without performance losses. With MoS, we achieve an improvement of 1.5 BLEU scores on IWSLT 2014 German-to-English corpus and an improvement of 0.76 CIDEr score on image captioning. Moreover, on the larger WMT 2014 machine translation dataset, our MoSboosted Transformer yields 29.6 BLEU score for English-toGerman and 42.1 BLEU score for English-to-French, outperforming the single-Softmax Transformer by 0.9 and 0.4 BLEU scores respectively and achieving the state-of-the-art result on WMT 2014 English-to-German task.

scholarly journals Guiding Attention in Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Dialogue Act Prediction

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 7594-7601
Author(s):  
Pierre Colombo ◽  
Emile Chapuis ◽  
Matteo Manica ◽  
Emmanuel Vignon ◽  
Giovanna Varni ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Random Fields ◽  
Conditional Random Fields ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Attention Mechanism ◽  
Accuracy Score ◽  
Beam Search ◽  
Conversational Agents ◽  
Neural Machine Translation

The task of predicting dialog acts (DA) based on conversational dialog is a key component in the development of conversational agents. Accurately predicting DAs requires a precise modeling of both the conversation and the global tag dependencies. We leverage seq2seq approaches widely adopted in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to improve the modelling of tag sequentiality. Seq2seq models are known to learn complex global dependencies while currently proposed approaches using linear conditional random fields (CRF) only model local tag dependencies. In this work, we introduce a seq2seq model tailored for DA classification using: a hierarchical encoder, a novel guided attention mechanism and beam search applied to both training and inference. Compared to the state of the art our model does not require handcrafted features and is trained end-to-end. Furthermore, the proposed approach achieves an unmatched accuracy score of 85% on SwDA, and state-of-the-art accuracy score of 91.6% on MRDA.

scholarly journals Modeling Coherence for Discourse Neural Machine Translation

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 7338-7345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Xiong ◽  
Zhongjun He ◽  
Hua Wu ◽  
Haifeng Wang
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Discourse Coherence ◽  
Baseline System

Discourse coherence plays an important role in the translation of one text. However, the previous reported models most focus on improving performance over individual sentence while ignoring cross-sentence links and dependencies, which affects the coherence of the text. In this paper, we propose to use discourse context and reward to refine the translation quality from the discourse perspective. In particular, we generate the translation of individual sentences at first. Next, we deliberate the preliminary produced translations, and train the model to learn the policy that produces discourse coherent text by a reward teacher. Practical results on multiple discourse test datasets indicate that our model significantly improves the translation quality over the state-of-the-art baseline system by +1.23 BLEU score. Moreover, our model generates more discourse coherent text and obtains +2.2 BLEU improvements when evaluated by discourse metrics.

scholarly journals A review of the state-of-the-art in automatic post-editing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Félix do Carmo ◽  
Dimitar Shterionov ◽  
Joss Moorkens ◽  
Joachim Wagner ◽  
Murhaf Hossari ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Translation Systems

AbstractThis article presents a review of the evolution of automatic post-editing, a term that describes methods to improve the output of machine translation systems, based on knowledge extracted from datasets that include post-edited content. The article describes the specificity of automatic post-editing in comparison with other tasks in machine translation, and it discusses how it may function as a complement to them. Particular detail is given in the article to the five-year period that covers the shared tasks presented in WMT conferences (2015–2019). In this period, discussion of automatic post-editing evolved from the definition of its main parameters to an announced demise, associated with the difficulties in improving output obtained by neural methods, which was then followed by renewed interest. The article debates the role and relevance of automatic post-editing, both as an academic endeavour and as a useful application in commercial workflows.

scholarly journals N-gram-based Machine Translation

2006 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 527-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
José B. Mariño ◽  
Rafael E. Banchs ◽  
Josep M. Crego ◽  
Adrià de Gispert ◽  
Patrik Lambert ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Linear Combination ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
The State ◽  
Translation Model ◽  
Model Based ◽  
N Gram ◽  
Log Linear

This article describes in detail an n-gram approach to statistical machine translation. This approach consists of a log-linear combination of a translation model based on n-grams of bilingual units, which are referred to as tuples, along with four specific feature functions. Translation performance, which happens to be in the state of the art, is demonstrated with Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish translations of the European Parliament Plenary Sessions (EPPS).

scholarly journals Abstractive Summarization: A Survey of the State of the Art

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 9815-9822 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui Lin ◽  
Vincent Ng
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Text Summarization ◽  
Abstract Representation ◽  
Automatic Text Summarization ◽  
Input Text ◽  
Gradual Shift ◽  
Abstractive Summarization ◽  
Automatic Text

The focus of automatic text summarization research has exhibited a gradual shift from extractive methods to abstractive methods in recent years, owing in part to advances in neural methods. Originally developed for machine translation, neural methods provide a viable framework for obtaining an abstract representation of the meaning of an input text and generating informative, fluent, and human-like summaries. This paper surveys existing approaches to abstractive summarization, focusing on the recently developed neural approaches.

scholarly journals Neural Machine Translation with Joint Representation

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 8285-8292
Author(s):  
Yanyang Li ◽  
Qiang Wang ◽  
Tong Xiao ◽  
Tongran Liu ◽  
Jingbo Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
The State ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Joint Representation

Though early successes of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems are attributed in part to the explicit modelling of the interaction between any two source and target units, e.g., alignment, the recent Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems resort to the attention which partially encodes the interaction for efficiency. In this paper, we employ Joint Representation that fully accounts for each possible interaction. We sidestep the inefficiency issue by refining representations with the proposed efficient attention operation. The resulting Reformer models offer a new Sequence-to-Sequence modelling paradigm besides the Encoder-Decoder framework and outperform the Transformer baseline in either the small scale IWSLT14 German-English, English-German and IWSLT15 Vietnamese-English or the large scale NIST12 Chinese-English translation tasks by about 1 BLEU point. We also propose a systematic model scaling approach, allowing the Reformer model to beat the state-of-the-art Transformer in IWSLT14 German-English and NIST12 Chinese-English with about 50% fewer parameters. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/lyy1994/reformer.

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