rapidprototypingofatransfer-basedhebrew-to-english.pptVIP

June 20, 2007 ISCOL/BISFAI-2007 Rapid Prototyping of a Transfer-based Hebrew-to-EnglishMachine Translation System Alon Lavie Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University Joint work with: Shuly Wintner, Danny Shacham, Nurit Melnik, Yuval Krymolowski - University of Haifa Erik Peterson – Carnegie Mellon University Outline Context of this Work CMU Statistical Transfer MT Framework Hebrew and its Challenges for MT Hebrew-to-English System Morphological Analysis and Generation MT Resources: lexicon and grammar Translation Examples Performance Evaluation Conclusions, Current and Future Work Current State-of-the-art in Machine Translation MT underwent a major paradigm shift over the past 15 years: From manually crafted rule-based systems with manually designed knowledge resources To search-based approaches founded on automatic extraction of translation models/units from large sentence-parallel corpora Current Dominant Approach: Phrase-based Statistical MT: Extract and statistically model large volumes of phrase-to-phrase correspondences from automatically word-aligned parallel corpora “Decode” new input by searching for the most likely sequence of phrase matches, using a statistical Language Model for the target language Current State-of-the-art in Machine Translation Phrase-based MT State-of-the-art: Requires minimally several million words of parallel text for adequate training Limited to language-pairs for which such data exists: major European languages, Chinese, Japanese, a few others… Linguistically shallow and highly lexicalized models result in weak generalization Best performance levels (BLEU=~0.6) on Arabic-to-English provide understandable but often still somewhat disfluent translations Ill suited for Hebrew and most of the world’s minor languages CMU’s Statistical-Transfer (XFER) Approach Framework: Statistical search-based approach with syntactic translation transfer rules that can be acquired from data but also developed and extended by