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。     

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.     

Semi-supervised model adaptation for statistical machine translation

Statistical machine translation systems are usually trained on large amounts of bilingual text (used to learn a translation model), and also large amounts of monolingual text in the target language (used to train a language model). In this article we explore the use of semi-supervised model adaptation methods for the effective use of monolingual data from the source language in order to improve translation quality. We propose several algorithms with this aim, and present the strengths and weaknesses of each one. We present detailed experimental evaluations on the French–English EuroParl data set and on data from the NIST Chinese–English large-data track. We show a significant improvement in translation quality on both tasks.     

Improving statistical machine translation using shallow linguistic knowledge

We describe methods for improving the performance of statistical machine translation (SMT) between four linguistically different languages, i.e., Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean by using morphosyntactic knowledge. For the purpose of reducing the translation ambiguities and generating grammatically correct and fluent translation output, we address the use of shallow linguistic knowledge, that is: (1) enriching a word with its morphosyntactic features, (2) obtaining shallow linguistically-motivated phrase pairs, (3) iteratively refining word alignment using filtered phrase pairs, and (4) building a language model from morphosyntactically enriched words. Previous studies reported that the introduction of syntactic features into SMT models resulted in only a slight improvement in performance in spite of the heavy computational expense, however, this study demonstrates the effectiveness of morphosyntactic features, when reliable, discriminative features are used. Our experimental results show that word representations that incorporate morphosyntactic features significantly improve the performance of the translation model and language model. Moreover, we show that refining the word alignment using fine-grained phrase pairs is effective in improving system performance.     

面向汉维机器翻译的双语关联度优化模型

针对汉语—维吾尔语的统计机器翻译系统中存在的语义无关性问题,提出基于神经网络机器翻译方法的双语关联度优化模型。该模型利用注意力机制捕获词对齐信息,引入双语短语间的语义相关性和内部词汇匹配度,预测双语短语的生成概率并将其作为双语关联度,以优化统计翻译模型中的短语翻译得分。在第十一届全国机器翻译研讨会（CWMT 2015）汉维公开机器翻译数据集上的实验结果表明,与基线系统相比,在使用较小规模的训练数据和词汇表的条件下,所提方法可以有效地同时提高短语级别和句子级别的机器翻译任务性能,分别获得最高2.49和0.59的BLEU值提升。     

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...     

基于自然标注信息和隐含主题模型的无监督文本特征抽取

术语和惯用短语可以体现文本特征。无监督的抽取特征词语对诸多自然语言处理工作起到支持作用。该文提出了“聚类-验证”过程,使用主题模型对文本中的字符进行聚类,并采用自然标注信息对提取出的字符串进行验证和过滤,从而实现了从未分词领域语料中无监督获得词语表的方法。通过优化和过滤,我们可以进一步获得了富含有术语信息和特征短语的高置信度特征词表。在对计算机科学等六类不同领域语料的实验中,该方法抽取的特征词表具有较好的文体区分度和领域区分度。     

GREAT: open source software for statistical machine translation

In this article, the first public release of GREAT as an open-source, statistical machine translation (SMT) software toolkit is described. GREAT is based on a bilingual language modelling approach for SMT, which is so far implemented for n-gram models based on the framework of stochastic finite-state transducers. The use of finite-state models is motivated by their simplicity, their versatility, and the fact that they present a lower computational cost, if compared with other more expressive models. Moreover, if translation is assumed to be a subsequential process, finite-state models are enough for modelling the existing relations between a source and a target language. GREAT includes some characteristics usually present in state-of-the-art SMT, such as phrase-based translation models or a log-linear framework for local features. Experimental results on a well-known corpus such as Europarl are reported in order to validate this software. A competitive translation quality is achieved, yet using both a lower number of model parameters and a lower response time than the widely-used, state-of-the-art SMT system Moses.     

基于Transfer和Triangulation融合的中介语统计机器翻译方法

为了解决在构建统计机器翻译系统过程中所面临的双语平行数据缺乏的问题,该文提出了一种新的基于中介语的翻译方法,称为Transfer-Triangulation方法。该方法可以在基于中介语的翻译过程中,结合传统的Transfer方法和Triangulation方法的优点,利用解码中介语短语的方法改进短语表。该文方法是在使用英语作为中介语的德-汉翻译任务中进行评价的。实验结果表明,相比于传统的基于中介语方法的基线系统,该方法显著提高了翻译性能。     

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。     

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.     

统计机器翻译中翻译规则抽取

对齐短语是决定统计机器翻译系统质量的核心模块。提出基于短语结构树的层次短语模型,这是利用串-树模型的思想对层次短语模型的扩展。基于短语结构树的层次短语模型是在双语对齐短语的基础之上结合英语短语结构树抽取翻译规则,并利用启发式策略获得翻译规则的扩展句法标记。采用翻译规则的统计机器翻译系统在不同数据集上具有稳定的翻译结果,在训练集和测试集的平均BlEU评分高于短语模型和层次短语模型的BLEU评分。     

基于多重线性回归模型的翻译等价对获取

翻译等价对在词典编纂、机器翻译和跨语言信息检索中有着广泛的应用。文章从双语句对的译文等价树中抽取翻译等价对。使用译文直译率、短语对齐概率和目标语-源语言短语长度差异等特征对自动获取的等价对进行评价。提出了一种基于多重线性回归模型的等价对评价方法,并结合N-Best策略对候选翻译等价对进行过滤。实验结果表明:在开放测试中,基于多重线性回归模型的等价对评价及过滤方法其性能要优于其它方法。     

Factored bilingual <Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis>-gram language models for statistical machine translation

In this work, we present an extension of n-gram-based translation models based on factored language models (FLMs). Translation units employed in the n-gram-based approach to statistical machine translation (SMT) are based on mappings of sequences of raw words, while translation model probabilities are estimated through standard language modeling of such bilingual units. Therefore, similar to other translation model approaches (phrase-based or hierarchical), the sparseness problem of the units being modeled leads to unreliable probability estimates, even under conditions where large bilingual corpora are available. In order to tackle this problem, we extend the n-gram-based approach to SMT by tightly integrating more general word representations, such as lemmas and morphological classes, and we use the flexible framework of FLMs to apply a number of different back-off techniques. In this work, we show that FLMs can also be successfully applied to translation modeling, yielding more robust probability estimates that integrate larger bilingual contexts during the translation process.     

基于短语的柬汉双语LDA主题模型

为了有效地获取双语文档的主题分布,提出了一种基于短语的柬汉双语LDA主题模型。修改了传统LDA主题模型中的词袋模型,融入短语（N-gram）的概念,能够在主题预测过程中考虑文章的词序以及上下文,并将之应用于可比语料的双语环境中。本模型基于一个3层贝叶斯网络模型,在此框架下,首先搜集中文和柬埔寨语的可比语料,每一对双语可比语料文档共享一个相同的主题分布,之后引入发现主题以及主题短语的主题模型：对每个单词,首先进行主题抽样,然后将其状态作为短语进行采样,最后对来自特定主题短语分布的单词进行采样。通过实验结果可知,基于短语的双语LDA主题模型比一般的双语LDA模型更能抓住文章的主题,且有更好的主题预测能力。     

基于双语信息和标签传播算法的中文情感词典构建方法

文本情感分析是目前自然语言处理领域的一个热点研究问题,具有广泛的实用价值和理论研究意义。情感词典构建则是文本情感分析的一项基础任务,即将词语按照情感倾向分为褒义、中性或者贬义。然而,中文情感词典构建存在两个主要问题 1)许多情感词存在多义、歧义的现象,即一个词语在不同语境中它的语义倾向也不尽相同,这给词语的情感计算带来困难;2)由国内外相关研究现状可知,中文情感字典建设的可用资源相对较少。考虑到英文情感分析研究中存在大量语料和词典,该文借助机器翻译系统,结合双语言资源的约束信息,利用标签传播算法(LP)计算词语的情感信息。在四个领域的实验结果显示我们的方法能获得一个分类精度高、覆盖领域语境的中文情感词典。     

利用上下文信息的统计机器翻译领域自适应

统计机器翻译系统用于翻译领域文本时,常常会遇到跨领域的问题 当待翻译文本与训练语料来自同一领域时,通常会得到较好的翻译效果;当领域差别较大时,翻译质量会明显下降。某个特定领域的双语平行语料是有限的,相对来说,领域混杂的平行语料和特定领域的单语文本更容易获得。该文充分利用这一特点,提出了一种包含领域信息的翻译概率计算模型,该模型联合使用混合领域双语和特定领域源语言单语进行机器翻译领域自适应。实验显示,自适应模型在IWSLT机器翻译评测3个测试集上均比Baseline有提高,证明了该文方法的有效性。