Definition extraction is the task of automatically identifying definitional sentences within texts. The task has proven useful in many research areas including ontology learning, relation extraction and question answering. However, current approaches – mostly focused on lexicosyntactic patterns – suffer from both low recall and precision, as definitional sentences occur in highly variable syntactic structures. In this paper, we propose Word-Class Lattices (WCLs), a generalization of word lattices that we use to model textual definitions. Lattices are learned from a dataset of definitions from Wikipedia. Our method is applied to the task of definition and hypernym extraction and compares favorably to other pattern generalization methods proposed in the literature. 1

Recent work has shown that translating segmentation lattices (lattices that encode alternative ways of breaking the input to an MT system into words), rather than text in any particular segmentation, improves translation quality of languages whose orthography does not mark morpheme boundaries. However, much of this work has relied on multiple segmenters that perform differently on the same input to generate sufficiently diverse source segmentation lattices. In this work, we describe a maximum entropy model of compound word splitting that relies on a few general features that can be used to generate segmentation lattices for most languages with productive compounding. Using a model optimized for German translation, we present results showing significant improvements in translation quality in German-English, Hungarian-English, and Turkish-English translation over state-ofthe-art baselines. 1

We introduce a word segmentation approach to languages where word boundaries are not orthographically marked, with application to Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PB-SMT). Instead of using manually segmented monolingual domain-specific corpora to train segmenters, we make use of bilingual corpora and statistical word alignment techniques. First of all, our approach is adapted for the specific translation task at hand by taking the corresponding source (target) language into account. Secondly, this approach does not rely on manually segmented training data so that it can be automatically adapted for different domains. We evaluate the performance of our segmentation approach on PB-SMT tasks from two domains and demonstrate that our approach scores consistently among the best results across different data conditions.

Traditional 1-best translation pipelines suffer a major drawback: the errors of 1-best outputs, inevitably introduced by each module, will propagate and accumulate along the pipeline. In order to alleviate this problem, we use compact structures, lattice and forest, in each module instead of 1-best results. We integrate both lattice and forest into a single tree-to-string system, and explore the algorithms of lattice parsing, lattice-forest-based rule extraction and decoding. More importantly, our model takes into account all the probabilities of different steps, such as segmentation, parsing, and translation. The main advantage of our model is that we can make global decision to search for the best segmentation, parse-tree and translation in one step. Medium-scale experiments show an improvement of +0.9 BLEU points over a state-of-the-art forest-based baseline. 1

We present a new translation model that include undecorated hierarchical-style phrase rules, decorated source-syntax rules, and partially decorated rules. Results show an increase in translation performance of up to 0.8 % BLEU for German–English translation when trained on the news-commentary corpus, using syntactic annotation from a source language parser. We also experimented with annotation from shallow taggers and found this increased performance by 0.5 % BLEU. 1

We present the CMU Syntax Augmented Machine Translation System that was used in the IWSLT-08 evaluation campaign. We participated in the Full-BTEC data track for Chinese-English translation, focusing on transcript translation. For this year’s evaluation, we ported the Syntax Augmented MT toolkit [1] to the Hadoop MapReduce [2] parallel processing architecture, allowing us to efficiently run experiments evaluating a novel “wider pipelines ” approach to integrate evidence from N-best alignments into our translation models. We describe each step of the MapReduce pipeline as it is implemented in the open-source SAMT toolkit, and show improvements in translation quality by using N-best alignments in both hierarchical and syntax augmented translation systems. 1.

In this paper we describe a new iterative translation process designed to leverage the massive number of online users who have minimal or no bilingual skill. The iterative process is supported by combining existing machine translation methods with monolingual human speakers. We have built a Web-based prototype that is capable of yielding high quality translations at much lower cost than traditional professional translators. Preliminary evaluation results of this prototype confirm the validity of the approach. Author Keywords Monolingual, translation, translation interface, human computation, distributed human computation, wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, machine translation. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):

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We propose a structure called dependency forest for statistical machine translation. A dependency forest compactly represents multiple dependency trees. We develop new algorithms for extracting string-todependency rules and training dependency language models. Our forest-based string-to-dependency system obtains significant improvements ranging from 1.36 to 1.46 BLEU points over the tree-based baseline on the NIST 2004/2005/2006 Chinese-English test sets. 1

As tokenization is usually ambiguous for many natural languages such as Chinese and Korean, tokenization errors might potentially introduce translation mistakes for translation systems that rely on 1-best tokenizations. While using lattices to offer more alternatives to translation systems have elegantly alleviated this problem, we take a further step to tokenize and translate jointly. Taking a sequence of atomic units that can be combined to form words in different ways as input, our joint decoder produces a tokenization on the source side and a translation on the target side simultaneously. By integrating tokenization and translation features in a discriminative framework, our joint decoder outperforms the baseline translation systems using 1-best tokenizations and lattices significantly on both Chinese-English and Korean-Chinese tasks. Interestingly, as a tokenizer, our joint decoder achieves significant improvements over monolingual Chinese tokenizers. 1