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297
Scalable inference and training of context-rich syntactic translation models
- In ACL
, 2006
"... Statistical MT has made great progress in the last few years, but current translation models are weak on re-ordering and target language fluency. Syntactic approaches seek to remedy these problems. In this paper, we take the framework for acquiring multi-level syntactic translation rules of (Galley ..."
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Cited by 280 (21 self)
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Statistical MT has made great progress in the last few years, but current translation models are weak on re-ordering and target language fluency. Syntactic approaches seek to remedy these problems. In this paper, we take the framework for acquiring multi-level syntactic translation rules of (Galley et al., 2004) from aligned tree-string pairs, and present two main extensions of their approach: first, instead of merely computing a single derivation that minimally explains a sentence pair, we construct a large number of derivations that include contextually richer rules, and account for multiple interpretations of unaligned words. Second, we propose probability estimates and a training procedure for weighting these rules. We contrast different approaches on real examples, show that our estimates based on multiple derivations favor phrasal re-orderings that are linguistically better motivated, and establish that our larger rules provide a 3.63 BLEU point increase over minimal rules. 1
Tree-to-String Alignment Template for Statistical Machine Translation
, 2006
"... We present a novel translation model based on tree-to-string alignment template (TAT) which describes the alignment between a source parse tree and a target string. A TAT is capable of generating both terminals and non-terminals and performing reordering at both low and high levels. The model is lin ..."
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Cited by 173 (32 self)
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We present a novel translation model based on tree-to-string alignment template (TAT) which describes the alignment between a source parse tree and a target string. A TAT is capable of generating both terminals and non-terminals and performing reordering at both low and high levels. The model is linguistically syntaxbased because TATs are extracted automatically from word-aligned, source side parsed parallel texts. To translate a source sentence, we first employ a parser to produce a source parse tree and then apply TATs to transform the tree into a target string. Our experiments show that the TAT-based model significantly outperforms Pharaoh, a state-of-the-art decoder for phrase-based models.
Posterior regularization for structured latent variable models
- Journal of Machine Learning Research
, 2010
"... We present posterior regularization, a probabilistic framework for structured, weakly supervised learning. Our framework efficiently incorporates indirect supervision via constraints on posterior distributions of probabilistic models with latent variables. Posterior regularization separates model co ..."
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Cited by 138 (8 self)
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We present posterior regularization, a probabilistic framework for structured, weakly supervised learning. Our framework efficiently incorporates indirect supervision via constraints on posterior distributions of probabilistic models with latent variables. Posterior regularization separates model complexity from the complexity of structural constraints it is desired to satisfy. By directly imposing decomposable regularization on the posterior moments of latent variables during learning, we retain the computational efficiency of the unconstrained model while ensuring desired constraints hold in expectation. We present an efficient algorithm for learning with posterior regularization and illustrate its versatility on a diverse set of structural constraints such as bijectivity, symmetry and group sparsity in several large scale experiments, including multi-view learning, cross-lingual dependency grammar induction, unsupervised part-of-speech induction,
Statistical syntax-directed translation with extended domain of locality
- In Proc. AMTA 2006
, 2006
"... A syntax-directed translator first parses the source-language input into a parsetree, and then recursively converts the tree into a string in the target-language. We model this conversion by an extended treeto-string transducer that have multi-level trees on the source-side, which gives our system m ..."
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Cited by 121 (14 self)
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A syntax-directed translator first parses the source-language input into a parsetree, and then recursively converts the tree into a string in the target-language. We model this conversion by an extended treeto-string transducer that have multi-level trees on the source-side, which gives our system more expressive power and flexibility. We also define a direct probability model and use a linear-time dynamic programming algorithm to search for the best derivation. The model is then extended to the general log-linear framework in order to rescore with other features like n-gram language models. We devise a simple-yet-effective algorithm to generate non-duplicate k-best translations for n-gram rescoring. Initial experimental results on English-to-Chinese translation are presented. 1
11,001 new features for statistical machine translation
- In North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT
, 2009
"... We use the Margin Infused Relaxed Algorithm of Crammer et al. to add a large number of new features to two machine translation systems: the Hiero hierarchical phrasebased translation system and our syntax-based translation system. On a large-scale Chinese-English translation task, we obtain statisti ..."
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Cited by 117 (2 self)
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We use the Margin Infused Relaxed Algorithm of Crammer et al. to add a large number of new features to two machine translation systems: the Hiero hierarchical phrasebased translation system and our syntax-based translation system. On a large-scale Chinese-English translation task, we obtain statistically significant improvements of +1.5 Bleu and +1.1 Bleu, respectively. We analyze the impact of the new features and the performance of the learning algorithm. 1
SPMT: Statistical Machine Translation with Syntactified Target Language Phrases
- in Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2006
, 2006
"... We introduce SPMT, a new class of statistical Translation Models that use Syntactified target language Phrases. The SPMT models outperform a state of the art phrase-based baseline model by 2.64 Bleu points on the NIST 2003 Chinese-English test corpus and 0.28 points on a humanbased quality metric th ..."
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Cited by 113 (6 self)
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We introduce SPMT, a new class of statistical Translation Models that use Syntactified target language Phrases. The SPMT models outperform a state of the art phrase-based baseline model by 2.64 Bleu points on the NIST 2003 Chinese-English test corpus and 0.28 points on a humanbased quality metric that ranks translations on a scale from 1 to 5. 1
Forestbased translation
- In Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT
, 2008
"... Among syntax-based translation models, the tree-based approach, which takes as input a parse tree of the source sentence, is a promising direction being faster and simpler than its string-based counterpart. However, current tree-based systems suffer from a major drawback: they only use the 1-best pa ..."
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Cited by 105 (24 self)
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Among syntax-based translation models, the tree-based approach, which takes as input a parse tree of the source sentence, is a promising direction being faster and simpler than its string-based counterpart. However, current tree-based systems suffer from a major drawback: they only use the 1-best parse to direct the translation, which potentially introduces translation mistakes due to parsing errors. We propose a forest-based approach that translates a packed forest of exponentially many parses, which encodes many more alternatives than standard n-best lists. Large-scale experiments show an absolute improvement of 1.7 BLEU points over the 1-best baseline. This result is also 0.8 points higher than decoding with 30-best parses, and takes even less time. 1
A survey of statistical machine translation
, 2007
"... 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 tec ..."
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Cited by 93 (6 self)
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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.
Tuning as ranking
- In Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
, 2011
"... We offer a simple, effective, and scalable method for statistical machine translation parameter tuning based on the pairwise approach to ranking (Herbrich et al., 1999). Unlike the popular MERT algorithm (Och, 2003), our pairwise ranking optimization (PRO) method is not limited to a handful of param ..."
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Cited by 93 (0 self)
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We offer a simple, effective, and scalable method for statistical machine translation parameter tuning based on the pairwise approach to ranking (Herbrich et al., 1999). Unlike the popular MERT algorithm (Och, 2003), our pairwise ranking optimization (PRO) method is not limited to a handful of parameters and can easily handle systems with thousands of features. Moreover, unlike recent approaches built upon the MIRA algorithm of Crammer and Singer (2003) (Watanabe et al., 2007; Chiang et al., 2008b), PRO is easy to implement. It uses off-the-shelf linear binary classifier software and can be built on top of an existing MERT framework in a matter of hours. We establish PRO’s scalability and effectiveness by comparing it to MERT and MIRA and demonstrate parity on both phrase-based and syntax-based systems in a variety of language pairs, using large scale data scenarios. 1
An Overview of Probabilistic Tree Transducers for Natural Language Processing
, 2005
"... Probabilistic finite-state string transducers (FSTs) are extremely popular in natural language processing, due to powerful generic methods for applying, composing, and learning them. Unfortunately, FSTs are not a good fit for much of the current work on probabilistic modeling for machine translati ..."
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Cited by 76 (7 self)
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Probabilistic finite-state string transducers (FSTs) are extremely popular in natural language processing, due to powerful generic methods for applying, composing, and learning them. Unfortunately, FSTs are not a good fit for much of the current work on probabilistic modeling for machine translation, summarization, paraphrasing, and language modeling. These methods operate directly on trees, rather than strings. We show that tree acceptors and tree transducers subsume most of this work, and we discuss algorithms for realizing the same benefits found in probabilistic string transduction.
