一种基于词素媒介的汉蒙统计机器翻译方法

汉蒙语形态差异性及平行语料库规模小制约了汉蒙统计机器翻译性能的提升。该文将蒙古语形态信息引入汉蒙统计机器翻译中,通过将蒙古语切分成词素的形式,构造汉语词和蒙古语词素,以及蒙古语词素和蒙古语的映射关系,弥补汉蒙形态结构上的非对称性,并将词素作为中间语言,通过训练汉语—蒙古语词素以及蒙古语词素-蒙古语统计机器翻译系统,构建出新的短语翻译表和调序模型,并采用多路径解码及多特征的方式融入汉蒙统计机器翻译。实验结果表明,将基于词素媒介构建出的短语翻译表和调序模型引入现有统计机器翻译方法,使得译文在BLEU值上比基线系统有了明显提高,一定程度上消解了数据稀疏和形态差异对汉蒙统计机器翻译的影响。该方法是一种通用的方法,通过词素和短语两个层面信息的结合,实现了两种语言在形态结构上的对称,不仅适用于汉蒙统计机器翻译,还适用于形态非对称且低资源的语言对。     

汉英短语翻译对的自动抽取

介绍从平行语料库中如何抽取双语短语翻译对。首先用统计模型正则期望从汉语专利语料库中抽取汉语短语。抽取的短语利用统计知识和语言学知识来过滤,使得过滤后汉语短语的正确率较高;其次,利用词对齐工具Giza++从汉英平行语料库中抽取词汇对齐,在词汇对齐的基础上利用开源工具Moses抽取汉英短语对齐,根据短语对齐与抽取出的高质量汉语短语的交集来抽取候选的汉英互译的源语言短语;接着使用停用词、对数似然估计法LLR和上下文熵来对英语短语翻译进行过滤。实验结果表明,过滤后,抽取的汉语短语准确率为97.6%,汉英短语翻译对的准确率为92.4%。     

Topic-aware pivot language approach for statistical machine translation

The pivot language approach for statistical machine translation （SMT） is a good method to break the resource bottleneck for certain language pairs. However, in the implementation of conventional approaches, pivot- side context information is far from fully utilized, resulting in erroneous estimations of translation probabilities. In this study, we propose two topic-aware pivot language approaches to use different levels of pivot-side context. The first method takes advantage of document-level context by assuming that the bridged phrase pairs should be similar in the document-level topic distributions. The second method focuses on the effect of local context. Central to this approach are that the phrase sense can be reflected by local context in the form of probabilistic topics, and that bridged phrase pairs should be compatible in the latent sense distributions. Then, we build an interpolated model bringing the above methods together to further enhance the system performance. Experimental results on French-Spanish and French-German translations using English as the pivot language demonstrate the effectiveness of topic-based context in pivot-based SMT.     

Recursive alignment block classification technique for word reordering in statistical machine translation

Statistical machine translation (SMT) is based on alignment models which learn from bilingual corpora the word correspondences between source and target language. These models are assumed to be capable of learning reorderings. However, the difference in word order between two languages is one of the most important sources of errors in SMT. In this paper, we show that SMT can take advantage of inductive learning in order to solve reordering problems. Given a word alignment, we identify those pairs of consecutive source blocks (sequences of words) whose translation is swapped, i.e. those blocks which, if swapped, generate a correct monotonic translation. Afterwards, we classify these pairs into groups, following recursively a co-occurrence block criterion, in order to infer reorderings. Inside the same group, we allow new internal combination in order to generalize the reorder to unseen pairs of blocks. Then, we identify the pairs of blocks in the source corpora (both training and test) which belong to the same group. We swap them and we use the modified source training corpora to realign and to build the final translation system. We have evaluated our reordering approach both in alignment and translation quality. In addition, we have used two state-of-the-art SMT systems: a Phrased-based and an Ngram-based. Experiments are reported on the EuroParl task, showing improvements almost over 1 point in the standard MT evaluation metrics (mWER and BLEU).     

句对齐研究综述

神经机器翻译是目前机器翻译领域的主流方法,拥有足够数量的双语平行语料是训练出一个好的翻译模型的前提。双语句对齐技术作为一种从不同语言端单语语料中获取双语平行句对的技术,因此得到广泛的研究。该文首先简单介绍句对齐任务及其相应的评测标准,然后归纳总结前人在句对齐任务上的研究进展,以及句对齐任务的相关信息,并简单概括参加团队所提交的系统,最后对当前工作进行总结并展望未来的工作。     

译文语序的领域性思考:一种融合主题信息的领域自适应调序模型

领域自适应研究的目标是建立一种动态调整翻译模型,使翻译模型对目标领域的语言特征具备较强的学习和处理能力,借以保证翻译系统在不同领域获得平衡可靠的翻译能力。现有翻译模型的自适应研究已经取得显著进展,但调序过程的领域适应性研究相对较少。在该文前期工作中通过对大规模源语言和目标语言的真实互译样本统计发现,在语义等价的短语级互译对子中,36.17%的样本在不同领域中的语序存在显著差异。针对这一问题,该文从主题角度出发,探索不同主题分布下的短语调序差异,提出一种融合主题信息的领域自适应调序模型。实验结果显示,嵌入调序适应性模型的翻译系统取得了较为明显的性能优势。     

Bilingual LSA-based adaptation for statistical machine translation

We propose a novel approach to cross-lingual language model and translation lexicon adaptation for statistical machine translation (SMT) based on bilingual latent semantic analysis. Bilingual LSA enables latent topic distributions to be efficiently transferred across languages by enforcing a one-to-one topic correspondence during training. Using the proposed bilingual LSA framework, model adaptation can be performed by, first, inferring the topic posterior distribution of the source text and then applying the inferred distribution to an n-gram language model of the target language and translation lexicon via marginal adaptation. The background phrase table is enhanced with the additional phrase scores computed using the adapted translation lexicon. The proposed framework also features rapid bootstrapping of LSA models for new languages based on a source LSA model of another language. Our approach is evaluated on the Chinese–English MT06 test set using the medium-scale SMT system and the GALE SMT system measured in BLEU and NIST scores. Improvement in both scores is observed on both systems when the adapted language model and the adapted translation lexicon are applied individually. When the adapted language model and the adapted translation lexicon are applied simultaneously, the gain is additive. At the 95% confidence interval of the unadapted baseline system, the gain in both scores is statistically significant using the medium-scale SMT system, while the gain in the NIST score is statistically significant using the GALE SMT system.     

融入分类词典的汉越混合网络神经机器翻译集外词处理方法

在神经机器翻译中,因词表受限导致的集外词问题很大程度上影响了翻译系统的准确性。对于训练语料较少的资源稀缺型语言的神经机器翻译,这种问题表现得更为严重。近几年,受到外部知识融入的启发,该文在RNNSearch模型基础上,提出了一种融入分类词典的汉越混合网络神经机器翻译集外词处理方法。对于给定的源语言句子,扫描分类词典以确定候选短语句对并标签标记,解码端利用词级组件和短语组件的混合解码网络,很好地生成单词集外词和短语集外词的翻译,从而改善汉越神经机器翻译的性能。在汉越、英越和蒙汉翻译实验上表明,该方法显著提高了准确率,对于资源稀缺型语言的神经机器翻译性能有一定的提升。     

Improving neural sentence alignment with word translation

Sentence alignment is a basic task in natural lan-guage processing which aims to extract high-quality paral-lel sentences automatically.Motivated by the observation that aligned sentence pairs contain a larger number of aligned words than unaligned ones,we treat word translation as one of the most useful external knowledge.In this paper,we show how to explicitly integrate word translation into neural sentence alignment.Specifically,this paper proposes three cross-lingual encoders to incorporate word translation:1)Mixed Encoder that learns words and their translation annotation vectors over sequences where words and their translations are mixed alterma-tively;2)Factored Encoder that views word translations as fea-tures and encodes words and their translations by concatenating their embeddings;and 3)Gated Encoder that uses gate mechanism to selectively control the amount of word translations moving forward.Experimentation on NIST MT and Opensub-titles Chinese-English datasets on both non-monotonicity and monotonicity scenarios demonstrates that all the proposed encoders significantly improve sentence alignment performance.     

基于中心语块扩展的短语对齐

短语等价对在词典编纂、机器翻译和跨语言信息检索中有着广泛的应用．提出了一种新的短语对齐方法，使用可信度较高的词典对齐结果来抽取源语言短语的译文中心语块，依据译文扩展可信度来确定源语言短语的译文统计边界．从译文中心语块出发，结合译文统计边界生成源语言短语的所有候选译文．对候选译文进行评价，从中选出最可靠的译文．同时利用贪心算法消除源语言短语译文边界之间的交叉冲突．实验结果表明，所提出的方法在开放测试中其正确率达到了82．76％，性能好于其他方法．     

有限语料汉蒙统计机器翻译调序方法研究

自统计机器翻译技术出现以来,调序一直是语序差异显著的语言对互译系统中的关键问题,基于大规模语料训练的调序方法得到了广泛研究。目前汉蒙双语语料资源十分有限,使得现有的依赖于大规模语料和语言学知识的调序方法难以取得良好效果。该文对已有的相关研究进行了分析,提出了在有限语料条件下的汉蒙统计机器翻译调序方法。该方法依据语言学知识获取对译文语序影响显著的短语类型,研究这些短语类型的调序方案,并融入已有的调序模型实现调序的优化。实验表明该方法在有限语料条件下的效果提升显著。     

Improved Arabic-to-English statistical machine translation by reordering post-verbal subjects for word alignment

We study challenges raised by the order of Arabic verbs and their subjects in statistical machine translation (SMT). We show that the boundaries of post-verbal subjects (VS) are hard to detect accurately, even with a state-of-the-art Arabic dependency parser. In addition, VS constructions have highly ambiguous reordering patterns when translated to English, and these patterns are very different for matrix (main clause) VS and non-matrix (subordinate clause) VS. Based on this analysis, we propose a novel method for leveraging VS information in SMT: we reorder VS constructions into pre-verbal (SV) order for word alignment. Unlike previous approaches to source-side reordering, phrase extraction and decoding are performed using the original Arabic word order. This strategy significantly improves BLEU and TER scores, even on a strong large-scale baseline. Limiting reordering to matrix VS yields further improvements.     

单语句法分析指导的双语结构对齐

提出了一种单语句法分析指导的双语语料库结构对齐方法．该方法以统计的双语模型——反向转换文法为基础,通过把英语句法分析知识融入到双语模型中,实现英汉双语的结构对齐．与现有方法相比,只需要一种语言的句法分析结果,避开了汉语句法分析的难题,同时保证了双语结构对齐的语法合理性．实验结果表明,这种方法充分利用现有的句法分析知识,有效地提高了结构对齐的正确率．利用该方法获得的结构对齐双语料库对于翻译知识的自动获取研究具有重要意义．     

Labeling hierarchical phrase-based models without linguistic resources

Long-range word order differences are a well-known problem for machine translation. Unlike the standard phrase-based models which work with sequential and local phrase reordering, the hierarchical phrase-based model (Hiero) embeds the reordering of phrases within pairs of lexicalized context-free rules. This allows the model to handle long range reordering recursively. However, the Hiero grammar works with a single nonterminal label, which means that the rules are combined together into derivations independently and without reference to context outside the rules themselves. Follow-up work explored remedies involving nonterminal labels obtained from monolingual parsers and taggers. As of yet, no labeling mechanisms exist for the many languages for which there are no good quality parsers or taggers. In this paper we contribute a novel approach for acquiring reordering labels for Hiero grammars directly from the word-aligned parallel training corpus, without use of any taggers or parsers. The new labels represent types of alignment patterns in which a phrase pair is embedded within larger phrase pairs. In order to obtain alignment patterns that generalize well, we propose to decompose word alignments into trees over phrase pairs. Beside this labeling approach, we contribute coarse and sparse features for learning soft, weighted label-substitution as opposed to standard substitution. We report extensive experiments comparing our model to two baselines: Hiero and the known syntax augmented machine translation (SAMT) variant, which labels Hiero rules with nonterminals extracted from monolingual syntactic parses. We also test a simplified labeling scheme based on inversion transduction grammar (ITG). For the Chinese–English task we obtain performance improvement up to 1 BLEU point, whereas for the German–English task, where morphology is an issue, a minor (but statistically significant) improvement of 0.2 BLEU points is reported over SAMT. While ITG labeling does give a performance improvement, it remains sometimes suboptimal relative to our proposed labeling scheme.     

维汉机器翻译未登录词识别研究

针对维汉统计机器翻译中未登录词较多的现象和维吾尔语语言资源匮乏这一现状,结合维吾尔语构词特征以及相应的字符串相似度算法,提出了一种基于字符串相似度的维汉机器翻译未登录词识别模型。该模型借助短语表和外部词典,与未翻译的维语词求相似度,取相似度最大短语对应的汉语翻译作为此未登录词的最终翻译。实验证明,与基于词干切分的未登录词识别方法相比,此模型较好地保留了维吾尔语词信息,提高了译文的质量。     

A Substitution-Translation-Restoration Framework for Handling Unknown Words in Statistical Machine Translation

Unknown words are one of the key factors that greatly affect the translation quality.Traditionally, nearly all the related researches focus on obtaining the translation of the unknown words.However, these approaches have two disadvantages.On the one hand, they usually rely on many additional resources such as bilingual web data;on the other hand, they cannot guarantee good reordering and lexical selection of surrounding words.This paper gives a new perspective on handling unknown words in statistical machine translation (SMT).Instead of making great efforts to find the translation of unknown words, we focus on determining the semantic function of the unknown word in the test sentence and keeping the semantic function unchanged in the translation process.In this way, unknown words can help the phrase reordering and lexical selection of their surrounding words even though they still remain untranslated.In order to determine the semantic function of an unknown word, we employ the distributional semantic model and the bidirectional language model.Extensive experiments on both phrase-based and linguistically syntax-based SMT models in Chinese-to-English translation show that our method can substantially improve the translation quality.     

HMM Word and Phrase Alignment for Statistical Machine Translation

Estimation and alignment procedures for word and phrase alignment hidden Markov models (HMMs) are developed for the alignment of parallel text. The development of these models is motivated by an analysis of the desirable features of IBM Model 4, one of the original and most effective models for word alignment. These models are formulated to capture the desirable aspects of Model 4 in an HMM alignment formalism. Alignment behavior is analyzed and compared to human-generated reference alignments, and the ability of these models to capture different types of alignment phenomena is evaluated. In analyzing alignment performance, Chinese-English word alignments are shown to be comparable to those of IBM Model 4 even when models are trained over large parallel texts. In translation performance, phrase-based statistical machine translation systems based on these HMM alignments can equal and exceed systems based on Model 4 alignments, and this is shown in Arabic-English and Chinese-English translation. These alignment models can also be used to generate posterior statistics over collections of parallel text, and this is used to refine and extend phrase translation tables with a resulting improvement in translation quality.     

What types of word alignment improve statistical machine translation?

In most statistical machine translation (SMT) systems, bilingual segments are extracted via word alignment. However, there is a need for systematic study as to what alignment characteristics can benefit MT under specific experimental settings such as the type of MT system, the language pair or the type or size of the corpus. In this paper we perform, in each of these experimental settings, a statistical analysis of the data and study the sample correlation coefficients between a number of alignment or phrase table characteristics and variables such as the phrase table size, the number of untranslated words or the BLEU score. We report results for two different SMT systems (a phrase-based and an n-gram-based system) on Chinese-to-English FBIS and BTEC data, and Spanish-to-English European Parliament data. We find that the alignment characteristics which help in translation greatly depend on the MT system and on the corpus size. We give alignment hints to improve BLEU score, depending on the SMT system used and the type of corpus. For example, for phrase-based SMT, dense alignments are required with larger corpora, especially on the target side, while with smaller corpora, more precise, sparser alignments are better, especially on the source side. Avoiding some long-distance crossing links may also improve BLEU score with small corpora. We take these conclusions into account to modify two types of alignment systems, and get 1 to 1.6 % relative improvements in BLEU score on two held-out corpora, although the improved system is different in each corpus.