Adaptive Tuning for Statistical Machine Translation (AdapT)

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation - StatMT '07, 2007

Most state-of-the-art statistical machine translation systems use log-linear models, which are defined in terms of hypothesis features and weights for those features. It is standard to tune the feature weights in order to maximize a translation quality metric, using held-out test sentences and their corresponding reference translations. However, obtaining reference translations is expensive. In this paper, we introduce a new full-sentence paraphrase technique, based on English-to-English decoding with an MT system, and we demonstrate that the resulting paraphrases can be used to drastically reduce the number of human reference translations needed for parameter tuning, without a significant decrease in translation quality.

… on Statistical Machine Translation …, 2010

Computational Linguistics, 2013

Translation models used for statistical machine translation are compiled from parallel corpora that are manually translated. The common assumption is that parallel texts are symmetrical: The direction of translation is deemed irrelevant and is consequently ignored. Much research in Translation Studies indicates that the direction of translation matters, however, as translated language (translationese) has many unique properties. It has already been shown that phrase tables constructed from parallel corpora translated in the same direction as the translation task outperform those constructed from corpora translated in the opposite direction. We reconfirm that this is indeed the case, but emphasize the importance of also using texts translated in the “wrong” direction. We take advantage of information pertaining to the direction of translation in constructing phrase tables by adapting the translation model to the special properties of translationese. We explore two adaptation techniqu...

2009

This paper presents the results of the WMT09 shared tasks, which included a translation task, a system combination task, and an evaluation task. We conducted a large-scale manual evaluation of 87 machine translation systems and 22 system combination entries. We used the ranking of these systems to measure how strongly automatic metrics correlate with human judgments of translation quality, for more than 20 metrics. We present a new evaluation technique whereby system output is edited and judged for correctness. 2.1 Test data The test data for this year's task was created by hiring people to translate news articles that were drawn from a variety of sources during the period from the end of September to mid-October of 2008. A total of 136 articles were selected, in roughly equal amounts from a variety of Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian and Spanish news sites: 2

2010

Although the scoring features of state-of-theart 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.

International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering

The process Machine translation is a combination of many complex sub-processes and the quality of results of each sub-process executed in a well defined sequence determine the overall accuracy of the translation. Statistical Machine Translation approach considers each sentence in target language as a possible translation of any source language sentence. The possibility is calculated by probability and as obvious, sentence with highest probability is treated as the best translation. SMT is the most favoured approach not only because of its good results for corpus rich language pairs, but also for the tools that SMT approach has been enhanced with in past two and half decades. The paper gives a brief introduction to SMT: its steps and different tools available for each step.

2008

We describe a set of experiments to explore statistical techniques for ranking and selecting the best translations in a graph of translation hypotheses. In a previous paper (Carl, 2007) we have described how the hypotheses graph is generated through shallow mapping and permutation rules . We have given examples of its nodes consisting of vectors representing morpho-syntactic properties of words and phrases. This paper describes a number of methods for elaborating statistical feature functions from some of the vector components. The feature functions are trained off-line on different types of text and their log-linear combination is then used to retrieve the best translation paths in the graph. We compare two language modelling toolkits, the CMU and the SRI toolkit and arrive at three results: 1) word-lemma based feature function models produce better results than token-based models, 2) adding a PoS-tag feature function to the word-lemma model improves the output and 3) weights for lexical translations are suitable if the training material is similar to the texts to be translated 1 A number of recent SMT architectures are described

Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation - StatMT '09, 2009

This paper presents the results of the WMT09 shared tasks, which included a translation task, a system combination task, and an evaluation task. We conducted a large-scale manual evaluation of 87 machine translation systems and 22 system combination entries. We used the ranking of these systems to measure how strongly automatic metrics correlate with human judgments of translation quality, for more than 20 metrics. We present a new evaluation technique whereby system output is edited and judged for correctness. 2 Overview of the shared translation and system combination tasks The workshop examined translation between English and five other languages: German, Spanish, French, Czech, and Hungarian. We created a test set for each language pair by translating newspaper articles. We additionally provided training data and a baseline system. 2.1 Test data The test data for this year's task was created by hiring people to translate news articles that were drawn from a variety of sources during the period from the end of September to mid-October of 2008. A total of 136 articles were selected, in roughly equal amounts from a variety of Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian and Spanish news sites: 3

Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, 2008

We propose a two-stage system for spoken language machine translation. In the first stage, the source sentence is parsed and paraphrased into an intermediate language which retains the words in the source language but follows the word order of the target language as much as feasible. This stage is mostly linguistic. In the second stage, a statistical MT is performed to translate the intermediate language into the target language. For the task of English-to-Mandarin translation, we achieved a 2.5 increase in BLEU score and a 45% decrease in GIZA-Alignment Crossover, on IWSLT-06 data. In a human evaluation of the sentences that differed, the two-stage system was preferred three times as often as the baseline.

2016

Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems are based on bilingual sentence aligned data. The quality of translation depends on the data provided for translation learning. A huge parallel corpus is required for performing the statistical machine translation. The aim of this paper is to explore SMT using the Moses toolkit for creating a German-English translator. To perform the German to English translation, a parallel corpus of this language pair has been provided. Larger the size of the data provided for the training of the Moses decoder, more accurate is the translated output.