We describe a unified and coherent syntactic framework for supporting a semanticallyinformed syntactic approach to statistical machine translation. Semantically enriched syntactic tags assigned to the target-language training texts improved translation quality. The resulting system significantly outperformed a linguistically naive baseline model (Hiero), and reached the highest scores yet reported on the NIST 2009 Urdu-English translation task. This finding supports the hypothesis (posed by many researchers in the MT community, e.g., in DARPA GALE) that both syntactic and semantic information are critical for improving translation quality—and further demonstrates that large gains can be achieved for low-resource languages with different word order than English.
Related work in syntax-based MT includes @cite_4 , where a series of syntax rules are applied to a source language string to produce a target language phrase structure tree. The Penn English Treebank @cite_5 is used as the source for the syntactic labels and syntax trees are relabeled to improve translation quality. In this work, node-internal and node-external information is used to relabel nodes, similar to earlier work where structural context was used to relabel nodes in the parsing domain @cite_9 . Klein and Manning's methods include lexicalizing determiners and percent markers, making more fine-grained VP categories, and marking the properties of sister nodes on nodes. All of these labels are derivable from the trees themselves and not from an auxiliary source.
@cite_5 @cite_9 @cite_4
2106751371 2100921762 2461928176 2121127625 2168966090 2162245945 2129882630 1551104980 2115896319 2086959507 2035585180 2114887620 2140436026 2139621418 2168671000 2051818821 2016630033 3313028 2251796964 2799190968
We identify problems with the Penn Tree-bank that render it imperfect for syntax-based machine translation and propose methods of relabeling the syntax trees to improve translation quality. We develop a system incorporating a handful of relabeling strategies that yields a statistically significant improvement of 2.3 BLEU points over a baseline syntax-based system. We present a simple and effective framework for exploiting multiple monolingual treebanks with different annotation guidelines for parsing. Several types of transformation patterns (TP) are designed to capture the systematic annotation inconsistencies among different tree-banks. Based on such TPs, we design quasi-synchronous grammar features to augment the baseline parsing models. Our approach can significantly advance the state-of-the-art parsing accuracy on two widely used target tree-banks (Penn Chinese Treebank 5.1 and 6.0) using the Chinese Dependency Treebank as the source treebank. The improvements are respectively 1.37 and 1.10 with automatic part-of-speech tags. Moreover, an indirect comparison indicates that our approach also outperforms previous work based on treebank conversion. In example (1), a sentence from a Wall Street Journal article taken from the Penn TreeBank corpus is further segmented into four EDUs, (1a), (1b), (1c) and (1d) (RST, 2002). Discourse segmentation, clearly, is not as easy as sentence boundary detection. The lack of consensus with regards to what constitutes an elementary discourse unit adds to the difficulty. Building a rule based discourse segmenter can be a tedious task since these rules would have to be based on the underlying grammar of the particular parser that is to be used. Therefore, we adopted a neural network model for automatically building a discourse segmenter from an underlying corpus of segmented text. We chose to use part-of-speech tags, syntactic information, discourse cues and punctuation. Our ultimate goal is to build a discourse parser that uses this discourse segmenter. The data that we used to train and test our discourse segmenter is the RST-DT (RST, 2002) corpus. The corpus contains 385 Wall Street Journal articles from the Penn Treebank. The training set consists of 347 articles for a total of 6132 sentences, whilst the test set contains 38 articles for a total of 991 sentences. The RST-DT corpus provides us with pairs of sentences and EDUs. For the syntactic structure of the sentences, we have used both the gold standard Penn Treebank data and syntactic parse trees generated by (Charniak, 2000). As regards the discourse cues, we used a list of 168 possible discourse markers. This article considers approaches which rerank the output of an existing probabilistic parser. The base parser produces a set of candidate parses for each input sentence, with associated probabilities that define an initial ranking of these parses. A second model then attempts to improve upon this initial ranking, using additional features of the tree as evidence. The strength of our approach is that it allows a tree to be represented as an arbitrary set of features, without concerns about how these features interact or overlap and without the need to define a derivation or a generative model which takes these features into account. We introduce a new method for the reranking task, based on the boosting approach to ranking problems described in (1998). We apply the boosting method to parsing the Wall Street Journal treebank. The method combined the log-likelihood under a baseline model (that of Collins [1999]) with evidence from an additional 500,000 features over parse trees that were not included in the original model. The new model achieved 89.75 F-measure, a 13 relative decrease in F measure error over the baseline model's score of 88.2 . The article also introduces a new algorithm for the boosting approach which takes advantage of the sparsity of the feature space in the parsing data. Experiments show significant efficiency gains for the new algorithm over the obvious implementation of the boosting approach. We argue that the method is an appealing alternative—in terms of both simplicity and efficiency—to work on feature selection methods within log-linear (maximum-entropy) models. Although the experiments in this article are on natural language parsing (NLP), the approach should be applicable to many other NLP problems which are naturally framed as ranking tasks, for example, speech recognition, machine translation, or natural language generation. We present translation results on the shared task "Exploiting Parallel Texts for Statistical Machine Translation" generated by a chart parsing decoder operating on phrase tables augmented and generalized with target language syntactic categories. We use a target language parser to generate parse trees for each sentence on the target side of the bilingual training corpus, matching them with phrase table lattices built for the corresponding source sentence. Considering phrases that correspond to syntactic categories in the parse trees we develop techniques to augment (declare a syntactically motivated category for a phrase pair) and generalize (form mixed terminal and nonterminal phrases) the phrase table into a synchronous bilingual grammar. We present results on the French-to-English task for this workshop, representing significant improvements over the workshop's baseline system. Our translation system is available open-source under the GNU General Public License. We describe a method for incorporating syntactic information in statistical machine translation systems. The first step of the method is to parse the source language string that is being translated. The second step is to apply a series of transformations to the parse tree, effectively reordering the surface string on the source language side of the translation system. The goal of this step is to recover an underlying word order that is closer to the target language word-order than the original string. The reordering approach is applied as a pre-processing step in both the training and decoding phases of a phrase-based statistical MT system. We describe experiments on translation from German to English, showing an improvement from 25.2 Bleu score for a baseline system to 26.8 Bleu score for the system with reordering, a statistically significant improvement. We present a generative distributional model for the unsupervised induction of natural language syntax which explicitly models constituent yields and contexts. Parameter search with EM produces higher quality analyses than previously exhibited by unsupervised systems, giving the best published un-supervised parsing results on the ATIS corpus. Experiments on Penn treebank sentences of comparable length show an even higher F1 of 71 on non-trivial brackets. We compare distributionally induced and actual part-of-speech tags as input data, and examine extensions to the basic model. We discuss errors made by the system, compare the system to previous models, and discuss upper bounds, lower bounds, and stability for this task. The kinds of tree representations used in a treebank corpus can have a dramatic effect on performance of a parser based on the PCFG estimated from that corpus, causing the estimated likelihood of a tree to differ substantially from its frequency in the training corpus. This paper points out that the Penn II treebank representations are of the kind predicted to have such an effect, and describes a simple node relabeling transformation that improves a treebank PCFG-based parser's average precision and recall by around 8 , or approximately half of the performance difference between a simple PCFG model and the best broad-coverage parsers available today. This performance variation comes about because any PCFG, and hence the corpus of trees from which the PCFG is induced, embodies independence assumptions about the distribution of words and phrases. The particular independence assumptions implicit in a tree representation can be studied theoretically and investigated empirically by means of a tree transformation detransformation process. This article describes the resource-and system-building efforts of an 8-week Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence Summer Camp for Applied Language Exploration (SCALE-2009) on Semantically Informed Machine Translation (SIMT). We describe a new modality negation (MN) annotation scheme, the creation of a (publicly available) MN lexicon, and two automated MN taggers that we built using the annotation scheme and lexicon. Our annotation scheme isolates three components of modality and negation: a trigger (a word that conveys modality or negation), a target (an action associated with modality or negation), and a holder (an experiencer of modality). We describe how our MN lexicon was semi-automatically produced and we demonstrate that a structure-based MN tagger results in precision around 86 (depending on genre) for tagging of a standard LDC data set. We apply our MN annotation scheme to statistical machine translation using a syntactic framework that supports the inclusion of semantic annotations. Syntactic tags enriched with semantic annotations are assigned to parse trees in the target-language training texts through a process of tree grafting. Although the focus of our work is modality and negation, the tree grafting procedure is general and supports other types of semantic information. We exploit this capability by including named entities, produced by a pre-existing tagger, in addition to the MN elements produced by the taggers described here. The resulting system significantly outperformed a linguistically naive baseline model (Hiero), and reached the highest scores yet reported on the NIST 2009 Urdu-English test set. This finding supports the hypothesis that both syntactic and semantic information can improve translation quality. A characterization is given of the class of tree translations definable in monadic second-order logic (MSO), in terms of macro tree transducers. The first main result is that the MSO definable tree translations are exactly those tree translations realized by macro tree transducers (MTTs) with regular look-ahead that are single use restricted. For this the single use restriction known from attribute grammars is generalized to MTTs. Since MTTs are closed under regular look-ahead, this implies that every MSO definable tree translation can be realized by an MTT. The second main result is that the class of MSO definable tree translations can also be obtained by restricting MTTs with regular look-ahead to be finite copying, i.e., to require that each input subtree is processed only a bounded number of times. The single use restriction is a rather strong, static restriction on the rules of an MTT, whereas the finite copying restriction is a more liberal, dynamic restriction on the derivations of an MTT. levels, such as Pet6fi's text grammar and Rumelhart's schemata for stories. By defining permissible interrelations between constituents of larger texts at all levels of abstraction, these create meaning structures organized on both hierarchical and associative principles, rather than on a sequential basis. The automated "understanding" process consists of instantiating an appropriate set of event templates by associating a given text with the ERGO inventory of event templates and const ucting a network of instanti ted templates based on intertemplate relational rules and constraints. The network of instantiated t mplates thus represents the information content of the unstructured original text, and provides the structured input for the event record data bas . Details of the automated understanding process presented here in the abstract are given in the follo ing section. 3.2 Processing Principles. The process of data base generation involves two major functions: (1) co tent analysis of the incoming text (2) event record synthesis (or production) The first involves constructing a meaning representation of the text and the second the extraction of relevant information and its storage in a data base record. The major focus of ERGO is on reports of a particular class of events which describe aircraft movements. The unit of analysis is therefore the report, a textual unit consisting of one or more par graphs, each containing one or more sentences. The first step in the analytical process involves a lexical lookup: a lexical entry contains morphological, syntactic and semantic information, on the lines of Sager (1973) and (1973). Each sentence is then subjected to a syntactic analysis by means of an Augmented Transition Network (ATN) parser (Woods, 1970). Since event templates are based on propositional structures, the analytical Transition-based dependency parsers generally use heuristic decoding algorithms but can accommodate arbitrarily rich feature representations. In this paper, we show that we can improve the accuracy of such parsers by considering even richer feature sets than those employed in previous systems. In the standard Penn Treebank setup, our novel features improve attachment score form 91.4 to 92.9 , giving the best results so far for transition-based parsing and rivaling the best results overall. For the Chinese Treebank, they give a signficant improvement of the state of the art. An open source release of our parser is freely available. This paper describes a parser which generates parse trees with empty elements in which traces and fillers are co-indexed. The parser is an unlexicalized PCFG parser which is guaranteed to return the most probable parse. The grammar is extracted from a version of the PENN treebank which was automatically annotated with features in the style of Klein and Manning (2003). The annotation includes GPSG-style slash features which link traces and fillers, and other features which improve the general parsing accuracy. In an evaluation on the PENN treebank (, 1993), the parser outperformed other unlexicalized PCFG parsers in terms of labeled bracketing f-score. Its results for the empty category prediction task and the trace-filler co-indexation task exceed all previously reported results with 84.1 and 77.4 f-score, respectively. We present an automatic approach to tree annotation in which basic nonterminal symbols are alternately split and merged to maximize the likelihood of a training treebank. Starting with a simple X-bar grammar, we learn a new grammar whose nonterminals are subsymbols of the original nonterminals. In contrast with previous work, we are able to split various terminals to different degrees, as appropriate to the actual complexity in the data. Our grammars automatically learn the kinds of linguistic distinctions exhibited in previous work on manual tree annotation. On the other hand, our grammars are much more compact and substantially more accurate than previous work on automatic annotation. Despite its simplicity, our best grammar achieves an F1 of 90.2 on the Penn Treebank, higher than fully lexicalized systems. This paper reports on an empirically based system that automatically resolves VP ellipsis in the 644 examples identified in the parsed Penn Treebank. The results reported here represent the first systematic corpus-based study of VP ellipsis resolution, and the performance of the system is comparable to the best existing systems for pronoun resolution. The methodology and utilities described can be applied to other discourse-processing problems, such as other forms of ellipsis and anaphora resolution.The system determines potential antecedents for ellipsis by applying syntactic constraints, and these antecedents are ranked by combining structural and discourse preference factors such as recency, clausal relations, and parallelism. The system is evaluated by comparing its output to the choices of human coders. The system achieves a success rate of 94.8 , where success is defined as sharing of a head between the system choice and the coder choice, while a baseline recency-based scheme achieves a success rate of 75.0 by this measure. Other criteria for success are also examined. When success is defined as an exact, word-for-word match with the coder choice, the system performs with 76.0 accuracy, and the baseline approach achieves only 14.6 accuracy. Analysis of the individual components of the system shows that each of the structural and discourse constraints used are strong predictors of the antecedent of VP ellipsis. We describe a parsing approach that makes use of the perceptron algorithm, in conjunction with dynamic programming methods, to recover full constituent-based parse trees. The formalism allows a rich set of parse-tree features, including PCFG-based features, bigram and trigram dependency features, and surface features. A severe challenge in applying such an approach to full syntactic parsing is the efficiency of the parsing algorithms involved. We show that efficient training is feasible, using a Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) based parsing formalism. A lower-order dependency parsing model is used to restrict the search space of the full model, thereby making it efficient. Experiments on the Penn WSJ treebank show that the model achieves state-of-the-art performance, for both constituent and dependency accuracy. This paper describes a system and set of algorithms for automatically inducing stand-alone monolingual part-of-speech taggers, base noun-phrase bracketers, named-entity taggers and morphological analyzers for an arbitrary foreign language. Case studies include French, Chinese, Czech and Spanish.Existing text analysis tools for English are applied to bilingual text corpora and their output projected onto the second language via statistically derived word alignments. Simple direct annotation projection is quite noisy, however, even with optimal alignments. Thus this paper presents noise-robust tagger, bracketer and lemmatizer training procedures capable of accurate system bootstrapping from noisy and incomplete initial projections.Performance of the induced stand-alone part-of-speech tagger applied to French achieves 96 core part-of-speech (POS) tag accuracy, and the corresponding induced noun-phrase bracketer exceeds 91 F-measure. The induced morphological analyzer achieves over 99 lemmatization accuracy on the complete French verbal system.This achievement is particularly noteworthy in that it required absolutely no hand-annotated training data in the given language, and virtually no language-specific knowledge or resources beyond raw text. Performance also significantly exceeds that obtained by direct annotation projection. Treebank parsing can be seen as the search for an optimally refined grammar consistent with a coarse training treebank. We describe a method in which a minimal grammar is hierarchically refined using EM to give accurate, compact grammars. The resulting grammars are extremely compact compared to other high-performance parsers, yet the parser gives the best published accuracies on several languages, as well as the best generative parsing numbers in English. In addition, we give an associated coarse-to-fine inference scheme which vastly improves inference time with no loss in test set accuracy. Corpus-based approaches to machine translation (MT) rely on the availability of parallel corpora. To produce user-acceptable translation outputs, such systems need high quality data to be efficiently trained, optimized and evaluated. However, building high quality dataset is a relatively expensive task. In this paper, we describe the data collection and analysis of a large database of 10.881 SMT translation output hypotheses manually corrected. These post-editions were collected using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, following some ethical guidelines. A complete analysis of the collected data pointed out a high quality of the corrections with more than 87 of the collected post-editions that improve hypotheses and more than 94 of the crowdsourced post-editions which are at least of professional quality. We also post-edited 1,500 gold-standard reference translations (of bilingual parallel corpora generated by professional) and noticed that 72 of these translations needed to be corrected during post-edition. We computed a proximity measure between the different kind of translations and pointed out that reference translations are as far from the hypotheses as from the corrected hypotheses (i.e. the post-editions). In light of these last findings, we discuss the adequation of text-based generated reference translations to train setence-to-sentence based SMT systems. Annotation corpus for discourse relations benefits NLP tasks such as machine translation and question answering. In this paper, we present SciDTB, a domain-specific discourse treebank annotated on scientific articles. Different from widely-used RST-DT and PDTB, SciDTB uses dependency trees to represent discourse structure, which is flexible and simplified to some extent but do not sacrifice structural integrity. We discuss the labeling framework, annotation workflow and some statistics about SciDTB. Furthermore, our treebank is made as a benchmark for evaluating discourse dependency parsers, on which we provide several baselines as fundamental work.