依存树到串模型中引入双语短语的三种方法

依存树到串模型使用基于HDR片段的翻译规则。HDR片段是由中心词及其所有依存节点组成的树片段。这种翻译规则可以较好地捕捉语言中的句子模式和短语模式等组合现象,但在捕捉非组合现象(如习惯用语或固定搭配)方面存在不足。这类非组合现象易于由短语捕捉。为了更好地改善依存树到串模型的性能,本文提出了三种引入双语短语的方法,分别为引入句法短语、引入泛化句法短语及引入非句法短语。实验结果表明,同时使用句法短语、泛化句法短语及非句法短语时,可以将依存树到串模型的性能显著提高约1.0 BLEU值。     

Improving phrase-based statistical machine translation with morphosyntactic transformation

We present a phrase-based statistical machine translation approach which uses linguistic analysis in the preprocessing phase. The linguistic analysis includes morphological transformation and syntactic transformation. Since the word-order problem is solved using syntactic transformation, there is no reordering in the decoding phase. For morphological transformation, we use hand-crafted transformational rules. For syntactic transformation, we propose a transformational model based on a probabilistic context-free grammar. This model is trained using a bilingual corpus and a broad-coverage parser of the source language. This approach is applicable to language pairs in which the target language is poor in resources. We considered translation from English to Vietnamese and from English to French. Our experiments showed significant BLEU-score improvements in comparison with Pharaoh, a state-of-the-art phrase-based SMT system.     

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.     

A syntactically informed reordering model for statistical machine translation

Word reordering is one of the challengeable problems of machine translation. It is an important factor of quality and efficiency of machine translation systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel reordering model based on an innovative structure, named, phrasal dependency tree. The phrasal dependency tree is a modern syntactic structure which is based on dependency relationships between contiguous non-syntactic phrases. The proposed model integrates syntactical and statistical information in the context of log-linear model aimed at dealing with the reordering problems. It benefits from phrase dependencies, translation directions (orientations) and translation discontinuity between translated phrases. In comparison with well-known and popular reordering models such as distortion, lexicalised and hierarchical models, the experimental study demonstrates the superiority of our model in terms of translation quality. Performance is evaluated for Persian → English and English → German translation tasks using Tehran parallel corpus and WMT07 benchmarks, respectively. The results report 1.54/1.7 and 1.98/3.01 point improvements over the baseline in terms of BLEU/TER metrics on Persian → English and German → English translation tasks, respectively. On average our model retrieved a significant impact on precision with comparable recall value with respect to the lexicalised and distortion models.     

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。     

层次短语翻译模型的介词短语调序

在不同的语言中,句法成分的相对位置往往不同,介词短语表现尤为明显,因此正确的对介词短语进行调序对提高翻译质量至关重要。层次短语模型借助于形式语法规则,具有较强的处理长距离调序的能力,但是其并不对短语的句法成分进行区分,这会导致规则的使用不当,从而引起翻译错误。该文在层次短语模型的基础上,针对介词短语进行处理。首先利用条件随机场模型识别出介词短语,然后抽取出带有介词短语的规则,构建一个新的同步上下文无关文法。解码的时候,在这个同步上下文无关文法定义的空间里搜索找到最优的译文。相对于层次短语模型,该方法在我们内部的英汉数据集上调高了0.8个BLEU百分点,在NIST 2008 英汉翻译数据集上提高了0.5个BLEU百分点。     

汉蒙统计机器翻译中的调序方法研究

在基于短语的汉蒙统计机器翻译系统的研究中,我们发现存在着严重的语序错误。该文在对汉语和蒙古语句子语序进行研究的基础上,提出了基于蒙古语语序的汉语句子调序方法; 同时介绍了调序规则和调序算法的设计;最后给出了具体实验。实验证明这种方法明显提高了现有汉蒙机器翻译系统的性能。     

基于同步树序列替换文法的统计机器翻译模型

基于短语的模型是目前发展相对成熟的一种统计机器翻译(Statistical machine translation, SMT)模型. 但基于短语的模型不包含任何结构信息, 因而缺乏有效的全局调序能力, 同时不能对非连续短语进行建模. 基于句法的模型因具有结构信息而具有解决以上问题的潜力, 因而越来越受到研究者们的重视. 然而现有的大多数基于句法的模型都因严格的句法限制而制约了模型的描述能力. 为突破这种限制并将 基于短语的模型的优点融入到句法模型中, 本文提出一种基于同步树序列替换文法(Synchronous tree sequence substitution grammar, STSSG)的统计机器翻译模型. 在此模型中, 树序列被用作为基本的翻译单元. 在这种框架下, 不满足句法限制的翻译等价对和满足句法限制的翻译等价对都可以融入句法信息并被翻译模型所使用. 从而, 两种模型的优点均得到充分利用. 在2005年度美国国家标准与技术研究所(NIST)举办的机器翻译评比的中文翻译任务语料上的实验表明, 本文提出的模型显著地超过了两个基准系统: 基于短语的翻译系统Moses和一个基于严格树结构的句法翻译模型.     

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.     

汉维统计机器翻译中的形态学处理

针对汉语和维吾尔语语序差别(前者是主-谓-宾结构,后者是主-宾-谓结构)及形态差别较大的问题,通过编写调序规则将汉语调整为主-宾-谓结构,将维吾尔语单词切分为词干、词缀等更小的词素单元来训练统计模型,同时测试词素的切分粒度对翻译性能的影响.实验结果表明,对汉语句法结构的调整及以词干、词缀等更小的词素形式参与训练可以有效...     

融合源端句法和语义角色信息的AMR解析

序列到序列(seq2seq)的框架可以应用到抽象语义表示(AMR)解析任务中,把AMR解析当作一个从源端句子到目标端AMR图的翻译任务。然而,以前的工作通常把源端句子表示为一个单词序列,忽略了句子内部潜藏的句法和语义角色信息。基于seq2seq框架,该文提出了一个直接而有效的融合句法和语义角色信息的AMR解析方法。实验结果表明,该文的方法在AMR英文标准数据集上取得了6.7%的显著提升。最后,该文从多个角度深入分析了源端的句法和语义角色信息是如何对AMR解析提供帮助的。分析表明,词性信息和subword技术对AMR解析性能提升的贡献最大,上层句法和语义角色信息次之。     

Improving statistical MT by coupling reordering and decoding

In this paper we describe an elegant and efficient approach to coupling reordering and decoding in statistical machine translation, where the n-gram translation model is also employed as distortion model. The reordering search problem is tackled through a set of linguistically motivated rewrite rules, which are used to extend a monotonic search graph with reordering hypotheses. The extended graph is traversed in the global search when a fully informed decision can be taken. Further experiments show that the n-gram translation model can be successfully used as reordering model when estimated with reordered source words. Experiments are reported on the Europarl task (Spanish–English and English–Spanish). Results are presented regarding translation accuracy and computational efficiency, showing significant improvements in translation quality with respect to monotonic search for both translation directions at a very low computational cost.     

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。     

基于源语言句法增强解码的神经机器翻译方法

当前性能最优的机器翻译模型之一Transformer基于标准的端到端结构,仅依赖于平行句对,默认模型能够自动学习语料中的知识;但这种建模方式缺乏显式的引导,不能有效挖掘深层语言知识,特别是在语料规模和质量受限的低资源环境下,句子解码缺乏先验约束,从而造成译文质量下降。为了缓解上述问题,提出了基于源语言句法增强解码的神经机器翻译（SSED）方法,显式地引入源语句句法信息指导解码。所提方法首先利用源语句句法信息构造句法感知的遮挡机制,引导编码自注意力生成一个额外的句法相关表征;然后将句法相关表征作为原句表征的补充,通过注意力机制融入解码,共同指导目标语言的生成,实现对模型的先验句法增强。在多个IWSLT及WMT标准机器翻译评测任务测试集上的实验结果显示,与Transformer基线模型相比,所提方法的BLEU值提高了0.84~3.41,达到了句法相关研究的最先进水平。句法信息与自注意力机制融合是有效的,利用源语言句法可指导神经机器翻译系统的解码过程,显著提高译文质量。     

面向机器翻译的中国手语的理解与合成

自然语言与可视化语言之间的自动翻译研究具有重大的现实意义和学术研究价值,它是一个崭新的、有发展前任的研究领域。该文从机器翻译的角度来考察汉语和中国手语之间的相同之处和差异,探讨两种语言在语序、句子结构、短语结构、特殊词类等方面的特点,建立了汉语中国手语机器翻译的一系列规则。在此基础之上,采用规则解释方法实现了一个汉语至可视化语言中国手语的翻译系统。     

基于虚拟上下文的统计机器翻译短语表的过滤

在基于短语的统计机器翻译系统中,自动抽取的短语表中不可避免的包含大量的冗余和错误的短语对,这浪费了解码资源又影响翻译质量。为了缓解这个问题,该文提出一种基于虚拟上下文的过滤短语表的方法。该方法引入虚拟上下文计算短语对的得分增量;并通过计算最大和最小的短语对的得分增量,设计了一种对短语对重排序的过滤策略。我们在NTCIR-9的中英数据上进行了验证实验,结果显示,当短语表的规模下降到原来的47%时,翻译质量的BLEU值提高了0.000 5;当短语表的规模下降到原来的30%时,BLEU值仅下降0.000 6。实验结果表明,在大规模短语表的过滤中,该文的方法是有效可行的。     

基于神经网络的统计机器翻译的预调序模型

长距离调序是统计机器翻译的一个主要挑战。之前的研究工作表明预调序是解决这个问题的一个可能的途径。在该工作中,我们沿着预调序这个研究方向,将神经网络建模结合到线性排序的框架之下,提出了一个基于神经网络的预调序模型。这个的预调序模型能够利用从海量未标注数据中抽取的句法和语意信息,从而更好的对不同语言之间的语序差异进行预测。我们在中文到英文以及日文到英文的机器翻译任务上进行了实验,实验结果表明了该方法的有效性。
     

面向层次短语翻译的词汇化调序方法研究

词汇化信息在短语调序中有重要的作用。然而层次短语翻译模型调序时并不考虑变量所泛化的短语的词汇化信息,因此该模型调序的歧义性较大。为此该文提出面向层次短语模型的词汇化调序方法。我们定义变量与邻接词语的调序关系,并使用变量所泛化短语片段的边界词信息来指导调序。在大规模语料的汉语到英语翻译评测任务中,我们的方法在NIST 2003-2005测试数据上获得了0.6～1.2 BLEU值的提高。     

Monte Carlo techniques for phrase-based translation

Recent advances in statistical machine translation have used approximate beam search for NP-complete inference within probabilistic translation models. We present an alternative approach of sampling from the posterior distribution defined by a translation model. We define a novel Gibbs sampler for sampling translations given a source sentence and show that it effectively explores this posterior distribution. In doing so we overcome the limitations of heuristic beam search and obtain theoretically sound solutions to inference problems such as finding the maximum probability translation and minimum risk training and decoding.     

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。