Word-based Systems Research Articles

Translational equivalence in Statistical Machine Translation or meaning as co-occurrence

In this paper, we will describe the current state-of-the-art of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), and reflect on how SMT handles meaning. Statistical Machine Translation is a corpus-based approach to MT: it de-rives the required knowledge to generate new translations from corpora. General-purpose SMT systems do not use any formal semantic representa-tion. Instead, they directly extract translationally equivalent words or word sequences – expressions with the same meaning – from bilingual parallel corpora. All statistical translation models are based on the idea of word alignment, i.e., the automatic linking of corresponding words in parallel texts. The first generation SMT systems were word-based. From a linguistic point of view, the major problem with word-based systems is that the mean-ing of a word is often ambiguous, and is determined by its context. Current state-of-the-art SMT-systems try to capture the local contextual dependen-cies by using phrases instead of words as units of translation. In order to solve more complex ambiguity problems (where a broader text scope or even domain information is needed), a Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) module is integrated in the Machine Translation environment.

Morphological decomposition in Arabic ASR systems

In recent years, the use of morphological decomposition strategies for Arabic Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has become increasingly popular. Systems trained on morphologically decomposed data are often used in combination with standard word-based approaches, and they have been found to yield consistent performance improvements. The present article contributes to this ongoing research endeavour by exploring the use of the ‘Morphological Analysis and Disambiguation for Arabic’ (MADA) tools for this purpose. System integration issues concerning language modelling and dictionary construction, as well as the estimation of pronunciation probabilities, are discussed. In particular, a novel solution for morpheme-to-word conversion is presented which makes use of an N-gram Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) approach. System performance is investigated within a multi-pass adaptation/combination framework. All the systems described in this paper are evaluated on an Arabic large vocabulary speech recognition task which includes both Broadcast News and Broadcast Conversation test data. It is shown that the use of MADA-based systems, in combination with word-based systems, can reduce the Word Error Rates by up to 8.1% relative.

SIG 12 Perspectives Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2011

SIG 12 Perspectives Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2011

A new indexing method based on word proximity for Chinese text retrieval

This paper proposed a novel text representation and matching scheme for Chinese text retrieval. At present, the indexing methods of Chinese retrieval systems are either character-based or word-based. The character-based indexing methods, such as bi-gram or tri-gram indexing, have high false drops due to the mismatches between queries and documents. On the other hand, it’s difficult to efficiently identify all the proper nouns, terminology of different domains, and phrases in the word-based indexing systems. The new indexing method uses both proximity and mutual information of the word pairs to represent the text coutent so as to overcome the high false drop, new word and phrase problems that exist in the character-based and word-based systems. The evaluation results indicate that the average query precision of proximity-based indexing is 5.2% higher than the best results of TREC-5.