We present a novel statistical approach to semantic parsing, WASP, for constructing a complete, formal meaning representation of a sentence. A semantic parser is learned given a set of sentences annotated with their correct meaning representations. The main innovation of WASP is its use of state-of-the-art statistical machine translation techniques. A word alignment model is used for lexical acquisition, and the parsing model itself can be seen as a syntax-based translation model. We show that WASP performs favorably in terms of both accuracy and coverage compared to existing learning methods requiring similar amount of supervision, and shows better robustness to variations in task complexity and word order.

Statistical machine translation (SMT) treats the translation of natural language as a machine learning problem. By examining many samples of human-produced translation, SMT algorithms automatically learn how to translate. SMT has made tremendous strides in less than two decades, and many popular techniques have only emerged within the last few years. This survey presents a tutorial overview of state-of-the-art SMT at the beginning of 2007. We begin with the context of the current research, and then move to a formal problem description and an overview of the four main subproblems: translational equivalence modeling, mathematical modeling, parameter estimation, and decoding. Along the way, we present a taxonomy of some different approaches within these areas. We conclude with an overview of evaluation and notes on future directions.

We present a hierarchical phrase-based translation model which annotates and generalizes existing phrase translations with syntactic categories derived from parsing the target side of a parallel corpus. We associate target parse trees for each training sentence pair with a search lattice constructed from the existing phrase translations on the corresponding source sentence, and consider techniques to produce a syntactically motivated bilingual synchronous grammar. We describe refinements to a chart based decoder and k-best extraction techniques to effectively parse the resulting grammar, which contains up to 4000 syntax-derivated nonterminals, producing translations that achieve significant improvements over Pharaoh, a stateof-the-art phrase based system, on the Europarl French-to-English task (Koehn and Monz, 2005). 1

We compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of a syntax-based machine translation model with a phrase-based machine translation model on several levels. We briefly describe each model, highlighting points where they differ. We include a quantitative comparison of the phrase pairs that each model has to work with, as well as the reasons why some phrase pairs are not learned by the syntax-based model. We then evaluate proposed improvements to the syntax-based extraction techniques in light of phrase pairs captured. We also compare the translation accuracy for all variations. 1

Generalized Multitext Grammar (GMTG) is a synchronous grammar formalism that is weakly equivalent to

This paper investigates some computational problems associated with probabilistic translation models that have recently been adopted in the literature on machine translation. These models can be viewed as pairs of probabilistic contextfree grammars working in a ‘synchronous’ way. Two hardness results for the class NP are reported, along with an exponential time lower-bound for certain classes of algorithms that are currently used in the literature. 1

done while at Microsoft Research We describe a novel approach to statistical machine translation that combines syntactic information in the source language with recent advances in phrasal translation. We depend on a source-language dependency parser and a word-aligned parallel corpus. The only target language resource assumed is a word breaker. These are used to produce treelet (“phrase”) translation pairs as well as several models, including a channel model, an order model, and a target language model. Together these models and the treelet translation pairs provide a powerful and promising approach to MT that incorporates the power of phrasal SMT with the linguistic generality available in a parser. We evaluate two decoding approaches, one inspired by dynamic programming and the

Many syntactic models in machine translation are channels that transform one tree into another, or synchronous grammars that generate trees in parallel. We present a new model of the translation process: quasi-synchronous grammar (QG).

We present a novel approach to deciding whether two sentences hold a paraphrase relationship. We employ a generative model that generates a paraphrase of a given sentence, and we use probabilistic inference to reason about whether two sentences share the paraphrase relationship. The model cleanly incorporates both syntax and lexical semantics using quasi-synchronous dependency grammars (Smith and Eisner, 2006). Furthermore, using a product of experts (Hinton, 2002), we combine the model with a complementary logistic regression model based on state-of-the-art lexical overlap features. We evaluate our models on the task of distinguishing true paraphrase pairs from false ones on a standard corpus, giving competitive state-of-the-art performance. 1

Parsing and translating natural languages can be viewed as problems of predicting tree structures. For machine learning approaches to these predictions, the diversity and high dimensionality of the structures involved mandate very large training sets. This paper presents a purely discriminative learning method that scales up well to problems of this size. Its accuracy was at least as good as other comparable methods on a standard parsing task. To our knowledge, it is the first purely discriminative learning algorithm for translation with treestructured models. Unlike other popular methods, this method does not require a great deal of feature engineering a priori, because it performs feature selection over a compound feature space as it learns. Experiments demonstrate the method’s versatility, accuracy, and efficiency. Relevant software is freely available at