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Training Phrase Translation Models with Leaving-One-Out
"... Several attempts have been made to learn phrase translation probabilities for phrasebased statistical machine translation that go beyond pure counting of phrases in word-aligned training data. Most approaches report problems with overfitting. We describe a novel leavingone-out approach to prevent ov ..."
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Cited by 33 (16 self)
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Several attempts have been made to learn phrase translation probabilities for phrasebased statistical machine translation that go beyond pure counting of phrases in word-aligned training data. Most approaches report problems with overfitting. We describe a novel leavingone-out approach to prevent over-fitting that allows us to train phrase models that show improved translation performance on the WMT08 Europarl German-English task. In contrast to most previous work where phrase models were trained separately from other models used in translation, we include all components such as single word lexica and reordering models in training. Using this consistent training of phrase models we are able to achieve improvements of up to 1.4 points in BLEU. As a side effect, the phrase table size is reduced by more than 80%. 1
Learning Linear Ordering Problems for Better Translation
, 2009
"... We apply machine learning to the Linear Ordering Problem in order to learn sentence-specific reordering models for machine translation. We demonstrate that even when these models are used as a mere preprocessing step for German-English translation, they significantly outperform Moses ’ integrated le ..."
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Cited by 27 (0 self)
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We apply machine learning to the Linear Ordering Problem in order to learn sentence-specific reordering models for machine translation. We demonstrate that even when these models are used as a mere preprocessing step for German-English translation, they significantly outperform Moses ’ integrated lexicalized reordering model. Our models are trained on automatically aligned bitext. Their form is simple but novel. They assess, based on features of the input sentence, how strongly each pair of input word tokens wi, wj would like to reverse their relative order. Combining all these pairwise preferences to find the best global reordering is NP-hard. However, we present a non-trivial O(n3) algorithm, based on chart parsing, that at least finds the best reordering within a certain exponentially large neighborhood. We show how to iterate this reordering process within a local search algorithm, which we use in training.
Bridging SMT and TM with Translation Recommendation
"... We propose a translation recommendation framework 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. W ..."
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Cited by 26 (1 self)
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We propose a translation recommendation framework 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 describe an implementation of this framework using an SVM binary classifier. We exploit methods to fine-tune the classifier and investigate a variety of features of different types. We rely on automatic MT evaluation metrics to approximate human judgements in our experiments. Experimental results show that our system can achieve 0.85 precision at 0.89 recall, excluding exact matches. Furthermore, it is possible for the end-user to achieve a desired balance between precision and recall by adjusting confidence levels. 1
Rule filtering by pattern for efficient hierarchical translation
- In Proceedings of the EACL
, 2009
"... We describe refinements to hierarchical translation search procedures intended to reduce both search errors and memory usage through modifications to hypothesis expansion in cube pruning and reductions in the size of the rule sets used in translation. Rules are put into syntactic classes based on th ..."
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Cited by 25 (4 self)
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We describe refinements to hierarchical translation search procedures intended to reduce both search errors and memory usage through modifications to hypothesis expansion in cube pruning and reductions in the size of the rule sets used in translation. Rules are put into syntactic classes based on the number of non-terminals and the pattern, and various filtering strategies are then applied to assess the impact on translation speed and quality. Results are reported on the 2008 NIST Arabic-to-English evaluation task. 1
Statistical phrase-based post-editing
- In Proceedings of NAACL
, 2007
"... We propose to use a statistical phrasebased machine translation system in a post-editing task: the system takes as input raw machine translation output (from a commercial rule-based MT system), and produces post-edited target-language text. We report on experiments that were performed on data collec ..."
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Cited by 24 (1 self)
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We propose to use a statistical phrasebased machine translation system in a post-editing task: the system takes as input raw machine translation output (from a commercial rule-based MT system), and produces post-edited target-language text. We report on experiments that were performed on data collected in precisely such a setting: pairs of raw MT output and their manually post-edited versions. In our evaluation, the output of our automatic post-editing (APE) system is not only better quality than the rule-based MT (both in terms of the BLEU and TER metrics), it is also better than the output of a stateof-the-art phrase-based MT system used in standalone translation mode. These results indicate that automatic post-editing constitutes a simple and efficient way of combining rule-based and statistical MT technologies. 1
Fast consensus decoding over translation forests
- In The Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics
, 2009
"... The minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding objective improves BLEU scores for machine translation output relative to the standard Viterbi objective of maximizing model score. However, MBR targeting BLEU is prohibitively slow to optimize over k-best lists for large k. In this paper, we introduce and analy ..."
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Cited by 24 (2 self)
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The minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding objective improves BLEU scores for machine translation output relative to the standard Viterbi objective of maximizing model score. However, MBR targeting BLEU is prohibitively slow to optimize over k-best lists for large k. In this paper, we introduce and analyze an alternative to MBR that is equally effective at improving performance, yet is asymptotically faster — running 80 times faster than MBR in experiments with 1000-best lists. Furthermore, our fast decoding procedure can select output sentences based on distributions over entire forests of translations, in addition to k-best lists. We evaluate our procedure on translation forests from two large-scale, state-of-the-art hierarchical machine translation systems. Our forest-based decoding objective consistently outperforms k-best list MBR, giving improvements of up to 1.0 BLEU. 1
Fast, Cheap, and Creative: Evaluating Translation Quality Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
"... ccb cs jhu edu Manual evaluation of translation quality is generally thought to be excessively time consuming and expensive. We explore a fast and inexpensive way of doing it using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to pay small sums to a large number of non-expert annotators. For $10 we redundantly recreate ..."
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Cited by 23 (2 self)
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ccb cs jhu edu Manual evaluation of translation quality is generally thought to be excessively time consuming and expensive. We explore a fast and inexpensive way of doing it using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to pay small sums to a large number of non-expert annotators. For $10 we redundantly recreate judgments from a WMT08 translation task. We find that when combined non-expert judgments have a high-level of agreement with the existing gold-standard judgments of machine translation quality, and correlate more strongly with expert judgments than Bleu does. We go on to show that Mechanical Turk can be used to calculate human-mediated translation edit rate (HTER), to conduct reading comprehension experiments with machine translation, and to create high quality reference translations. 1
Effective use of linguistic and contextual information for statistical machine translation
- In Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
, 2008
"... Current methods of using lexical features in machine translation have difficulty in scaling up to realistic MT tasks due to a prohibitively large number of parameters involved. In this paper, we propose methods of using new linguistic and contextual features that do not suffer from this problem and ..."
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Cited by 23 (2 self)
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Current methods of using lexical features in machine translation have difficulty in scaling up to realistic MT tasks due to a prohibitively large number of parameters involved. In this paper, we propose methods of using new linguistic and contextual features that do not suffer from this problem and apply them in a state-ofthe-art hierarchical MT system. The features used in this work are non-terminal labels, non-terminal length distribution, source string context and source dependency LM scores. The effectiveness of our techniques is demonstrated by significant improvements over a strong baseline. On Arabic-to-English translation, improvements in lower-cased BLEU are
2007a. A Reexamination of Machine Learning Approaches for Sentence-Level MT Evaluation
- In Proceedings of ACL
"... Recent studies suggest that machine learning can be applied to develop good automatic evaluation metrics for machine translated sentences. This paper further analyzes aspects of learning that impact performance. We argue that previously proposed approaches of training a Human-Likeness classifier is ..."
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Cited by 21 (3 self)
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Recent studies suggest that machine learning can be applied to develop good automatic evaluation metrics for machine translated sentences. This paper further analyzes aspects of learning that impact performance. We argue that previously proposed approaches of training a Human-Likeness classifier is not as well correlated with human judgments of translation quality, but that regression-based learning produces more reliable metrics. We demonstrate the feasibility of regression-based metrics through empirical analysis of learning curves and generalization studies and show that they can achieve higher correlations with human judgments than standard automatic metrics. 1
