Models of Morphosyntax for Statistical Machine Translation

Models of Morphosyntax for Statistical Machine Translation -- Morphosyntaktische Modelle für statistische maschinelle Übersetzung

Statistical approaches to machine translation (MT) have shown themselves to be effective in the last few years. However, when translating into a morphologically rich language this is not true, particularly when there is also significant syntactic divergence between the two languages. The quality of statistical machine translation is poor in this case because of independence assumptions made between the models of morphology, syntax and translation that do not reflect linguistic reality.

The project uses advances in automatic linguistic analysis of syntax and morphology to advance statistical MT. The dependencies between morphology, syntax and translation are directly modeled. This leads to the creation of translation models and search algorithms that dramatically improve translation quality for morphologically rich languages.

Funded by the German Research Foundation

Principal Investigators

Dr. Alexander Fraser

Prof. Dr. Hinrich Schuetze

Present Staff

Fabienne Braune

Fabienne Cap (nee Fritzinger)

Nadir Durrani

Hassan Sajjad

Past Staff

Publications

Alexander Fraser, Marion Weller, Aoife Cahill, Fabienne Cap (2012). Modeling Inflection and Word-Formation in SMT. In Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), to appear. abstract
Anita Gojun, Alexander Fraser (2012). Determining the Placement of German Verbs in English-to-German SMT. In Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), to appear. abstract
Hassan Sajjad, Nadir Durrani, Helmut Schmid, Alexander Fraser (2011). Comparing Two Techniques for Learning Transliteration Models Using a Parallel Corpus. In Proceedings of The 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), pages 129-137, Chiang Mai, Thailand, November.
Nadir Durrani, Helmut Schmid, Alexander Fraser (2011). A Joint Sequence Translation Model with Integrated Reordering. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 1045-1054, Portland, Oregon, USA, June. Errata
Hassan Sajjad, Alexander Fraser, Helmut Schmid (2011). An Algorithm for Unsupervised Transliteration Mining with an Application to Word Alignment. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 430-439, Portland, Oregon, USA, June.
Fabienne Braune, Alexander Fraser (2010). Improved Unsupervised Sentence Alignment for Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Parallel Corpora. In Proceedings of the the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING) - Posters, pages 81-89, Beijing, China, August. Software
Nadir Durrani, Hassan Sajjad, Alexander Fraser, Helmut Schmid (2010). Hindi-to-Urdu Machine Translation Through Transliteration. In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 465-474, Uppsala, Sweden, July.
Fabienne Fritzinger, Alexander Fraser (2010). How to Avoid Burning Ducks: Combining Linguistic Analysis and Corpus Statistics for German Compound Processing. In Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and MetricsMATR, pages 224-234, Uppsala, Sweden, July.
Florian Schwarck, Alexander Fraser, Hinrich Schuetze (2010). Bitext-Based Resolution of German Subject-Object Ambiguities. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Short Papers, pages 737-740, Los Angeles, California, USA, June.