Linguistically Motivated Statistical Machine Translation

This book provides a wide variety of algorithms and models to integrate linguistic knowledge into Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). It helps advance conventional SMT to linguistically motivated SMT by enhancing the following three essential components: translation, reordering and bracketing models. It also serves the purpose of promoting the in-depth study of the impacts of linguistic knowledge on machine translation. Finally it provides a systematic introduction of Bracketing Transduction Grammar (BTG) based SMT, one of the state-of-the-art SMT formalisms, as well as a case study of linguistically motivated SMT on a BTG-based platform.

This unique book provides a comprehensive introduction to the most popular syntax-based statistical machine translation models, filling a gap in the current literature for researchers and developers in human language technologies. While phrase-based models have previously dominated the field, syntax-based approaches have proved a popular alternative, as they elegantly solve many of the shortcomings of phrase-based models. The heart of this book is a detailed introduction to decoding for syntax-based models. The book begins with an overview of synchronous-context free grammar (SCFG) and synchronous tree-substitution grammar (STSG) along with their associated statistical models. It also describes how three popular instantiations (Hiero, SAMT, and GHKM) are learned from parallel corpora. It introduces and details hypergraphs and associated general algorithms, as well as algorithms for decoding with both tree and string input. Special attention is given to efficiency, including search approximations such as beam search and cube pruning, data structures, and parsing algorithms. The book consistently highlights the strengths (and limitations) of syntax-based approaches, including their ability to generalize phrase-based translation units, their modeling of specific linguistic phenomena, and their function of structuring the search space.

This volume provides an overview of the field of Hybrid Machine Translation (MT) and presents some of the latest research conducted by linguists and practitioners from different multidisciplinary areas. Nowadays, most important developments in MT are achieved by combining data-driven and rule-based techniques. These combinations typically involve hybridization of different traditional paradigms, such as the introduction of linguistic knowledge into statistical approaches to MT, the incorporation of data-driven components into rule-based approaches, or statistical and rule-based pre- and post-processing for both types of MT architectures. The book is of interest primarily to MT specialists, but also – in the wider fields of Computational Linguistics, Machine Learning and Data Mining – to translators and managers of translation companies and departments who are interested in recent developments concerning automated translation tools.

Lynne Bowker and Jairo Buitrago Ciro introduce the concept of machine translation literacy, a new kind of literacy for scholars and librarians in the digital age. This book is a must-read for researchers and information professionals eager to maximize the global reach and impact of any form of scholarly work.

Human language technologies continue to play an important part in the modern information society. This book contains papers presented at the fifth international conference ‘Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective (Baltic HLT 2012)’, held in Tartu, Estonia, in October 2012. Baltic HLT provides a special venue for new and ongoing work in computational linguistics and related disciplines, both in the Baltic states and in a broader geographical perspective. It brings together scientists, developers, providers and users of HLT, and is a forum for the sharing of new ideas and recent advances in human language processing, promoting cooperation between the research communities of computer science and linguistics from the Baltic countries and the rest of the world. Twenty long papers, as well as the posters or demos accepted for presentation at the conference, are published here. They cover a wide range of topics: morphological disambiguation, dependency syntax and valency, computational semantics, named entities, dialogue modeling, terminology extraction and management, machine translation, corpus and parallel corpus compiling, speech modeling and multimodal communication. Some of the papers also give a general overview of the state of the art of human language technology and language resources in the Baltic states. This book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the use and application of computational linguistics and related disciplines.

Learn how to build machine translation systems with deep learning from the ground up, from basic concepts to cutting-edge research.

The dream of automatic language translation is now closer thanks to recent advances in the techniques that underpin statistical machine translation. This class-tested textbook from an active researcher in the field, provides a clear and careful introduction to the latest methods and explains how to build machine translation systems for any two languages. It introduces the subject's building blocks from linguistics and probability, then covers the major models for machine translation: word-based, phrase-based, and tree-based, as well as machine translation evaluation, language modeling, discriminative training and advanced methods to integrate linguistic annotation. The book also reports the latest research, presents the major outstanding challenges, and enables novices as well as experienced researchers to make novel contributions to this exciting area. Ideal for students at undergraduate and graduate level, or for anyone interested in the latest developments in machine translation.