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Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 1 Learning-based MT Approaches for Languages with Limited Resources Alon Lavie Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University Joint work with: Jaime Carbonell, Lori Levin, Kathrin Probst, Erik Peterson, Christian Monson, Ariadna Font-Llitjos, Alison Alvarez, Roberto Aranovich

Learning-based MT Approaches for Languages with Limited Resources

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Learning-based MT Approaches for Languages with Limited Resources. Alon Lavie Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University Joint work with: Jaime Carbonell, Lori Levin, Kathrin Probst, Erik Peterson, Christian Monson, Ariadna Font-Llitjos, Alison Alvarez, Roberto Aranovich. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 1

Learning-based MT Approaches for Languages with Limited

Resources

Alon LavieLanguage Technologies Institute

Carnegie Mellon University

Joint work with: Jaime Carbonell, Lori Levin, Kathrin Probst, Erik Peterson, Christian Monson, Ariadna Font-Llitjos, Alison Alvarez, Roberto Aranovich

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 2

Outline• Rationale for learning-based MT• Roadmap for learning-based MT• Framework overview• Elicitation• Learning transfer Rules• Automatic rule refinement• Learning Morphology• Example prototypes• Implications for MT with vast parallel data• Conclusions and future directions

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 3

Machine Translation: Where are we today?

• Age of Internet and Globalization – great demand for MT: – Multiple official languages of UN, EU, Canada, etc.– Documentation dissemination for large manufacturers

(Microsoft, IBM, Caterpillar)• Economic incentive is still primarily within a small

number of language pairs• Some fairly good commercial products in the market for

these language pairs– Primarily a product of rule-based systems after many years

of development• Pervasive MT between most language pairs still non-

existent and not on the immediate horizon

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 4

Mi chiamo Alon Lavie My name is Alon Lavie

Give-information+personal-data (name=alon_lavie)

[s [vp accusative_pronoun “chiamare” proper_name]]

[s [np [possessive_pronoun “name”]]

[vp “be” proper_name]]

Direct

Transfer

Interlingua

Analysis Generation

Approaches to MT: Vaquois MT Triangle

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 5

Progression of MT• Started with rule-based systems

– Very large expert human effort to construct language-specific resources (grammars, lexicons)

– High-quality MT extremely expensive only for handful of language pairs

• Along came EBMT and then SMT…– Replaced human effort with extremely large volumes of

parallel text data– Less expensive, but still only feasible for a small number of

language pairs– We “traded” human labor with data

• Where does this take us in 5-10 years?– Large parallel corpora for maybe 25-50 language pairs

• What about all the other languages?• Is all this data (with very shallow representation of

language structure) really necessary?• Can we build MT approaches that learn deeper levels of

language structure and how they map from one language to another?

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 6

Why Machine Translation for Languages with Limited Resources?

• We are in the age of information explosion– The internet+web+Google anyone can get the

information they want anytime…• But what about the text in all those other

languages?– How do they read all this English stuff?– How do we read all the stuff that they put online?

• MT for these languages would Enable:– Better government access to native indigenous and

minority communities– Better minority and native community participation in

information-rich activities (health care, education, government) without giving up their languages.

– Civilian and military applications (disaster relief)– Language preservation

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 7

The Roadmap to Learning-based MT

• Automatic acquisition of necessary language resources and knowledge using machine learning methodologies:– Learning morphology (analysis/generation)– Rapid acquisition of broad coverage word-to-word and

phrase-to-phrase translation lexicons– Learning of syntactic structural mappings

• Tree-to-tree structure transformations [Knight et al], [Eisner], [Melamed] require parse trees for both languages

• Learning syntactic transfer rules with resources (grammar, parses) for just one of the two languages

– Automatic rule refinement and/or post-editing• A framework for integrating the acquired MT resources

into effective MT prototype systems• Effective integration of acquired knowledge with

statistical/distributional information

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 8

CMU’s AVENUE Approach• Elicitation: use bilingual native informants to produce a

small high-quality word-aligned bilingual corpus of translated phrases and sentences– Building Elicitation corpora from feature structures– Feature Detection and Navigation

• Transfer-rule Learning: apply ML-based methods to automatically acquire syntactic transfer rules for translation between the two languages– Learn from major language to minor language– Translate from minor language to major language

• XFER + Decoder:– XFER engine produces a lattice of possible transferred

structures at all levels– Decoder searches and selects the best scoring combination

• Rule Refinement: refine the acquired rules via a process of interaction with bilingual informants

• Morphology Learning• Word and Phrase bilingual lexicon acquisition

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 9

AVENUE Architecture

Learning Module

Transfer Rules

{PP,4894};;Score:0.0470PP::PP [NP POSTP] -> [PREP NP]((X2::Y1)(X1::Y2))

Translation Lexicon

Run Time Transfer System

Lattice Decoder

English Language Model

Word-to-Word Translation Probabilities

Word-aligned elicited data

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 10

Outline• Rationale for learning-based MT• Roadmap for learning-based MT• Framework overview• Elicitation• Learning transfer Rules• Automatic rule refinement• Learning Morphology• Example prototypes• Implications for MT with vast parallel data• Conclusions and future directions

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 11

Data Elicitation for Languages with Limited Resources

• Rationale:– Large volumes of parallel text not available create

a small maximally-diverse parallel corpus that directly supports the learning task

– Bilingual native informant(s) can translate and align a small pre-designed elicitation corpus, using elicitation tool

– Elicitation corpus designed to be typologically and structurally comprehensive and compositional

– Transfer-rule engine and new learning approach support acquisition of generalized transfer-rules from the data

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 12

Elicitation Tool: English-Chinese Example

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 13

Elicitation Tool:English-Chinese Example

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 14

Elicitation Tool:English-Hindi Example

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 15

Elicitation Tool:English-Arabic Example

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 16

Elicitation Tool:Spanish-Mapudungun Example

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 17

Designing Elicitation Corpora

• What do we want to elicit? – Diversity of linguistic phenomena and constructions– Syntactic structural diversity

• How do we construct an elicitation corpus?– Typological Elicitation Corpus based on elicitation and

documentation work of field linguists (e.g. Comrie 1977, Bouquiaux 1992): initial corpus size ~1000 examples

– Structural Elicitation Corpus based on representative sample of English phrase structures: ~120 examples

• Organized compositionally: elicit simple structures first, then use them as building blocks

• Goal: minimize size, maximize linguistic coverage

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 18

Typological Elicitation Corpus

• Feature Detection– Discover what features exist in the language and

where/how they are marked• Example: does the language mark gender of nouns?

How and where are these marked?– Method: compare translations of minimal pairs –

sentences that differ in only ONE feature

• Elicit translations/alignments for detected features and their combinations

• Dynamic corpus navigation based on feature detection: no need to elicit for combinations involving non-existent features

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 19

Typological Elicitation Corpus

• Initial typological corpus of about 1000 sentences was manually constructed

• New construction methodology for building an elicitation corpus using:– A feature specification: lists inventory of available

features and their values– A definition of the set of desired feature structures

• Schemas define sets of desired combinations of features and values

• Multiplier algorithm generates the comprehensive set of feature structures

– A generation grammar and lexicon: NLG generator generates NL sentences from the feature structures

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 20

Structural Elicitation Corpus• Goal: create a compact diverse sample corpus of

syntactic phrase structures in English in order to elicit how these map into the elicited language

• Methodology:– Extracted all CFG “rules” from Brown section of Penn

TreeBank (122K sentences)– Simplified POS tag set– Constructed frequency histogram of extracted rules– Pulled out simplest phrases for most frequent rules for NPs,

PPs, ADJPs, ADVPs, SBARs and Sentences– Some manual inspection and refinement

• Resulting corpus of about 120 phrases/sentences representing common structures

• See [Probst and Lavie, 2004]

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 21

Outline• Rationale for learning-based MT• Roadmap for learning-based MT• Framework overview• Elicitation• Learning transfer Rules• Automatic rule refinement• Learning Morphology• Example prototypes• Implications for MT with vast parallel data• Conclusions and future directions

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 22

Transfer Rule Formalism

Type informationPart-of-speech/constituent

informationAlignments

x-side constraints

y-side constraints

xy-constraints, e.g. ((Y1 AGR) = (X1 AGR))

;SL: the old man, TL: ha-ish ha-zaqen

NP::NP [DET ADJ N] -> [DET N DET ADJ]((X1::Y1)(X1::Y3)(X2::Y4)(X3::Y2)

((X1 AGR) = *3-SING)((X1 DEF = *DEF)((X3 AGR) = *3-SING)((X3 COUNT) = +)

((Y1 DEF) = *DEF)((Y3 DEF) = *DEF)((Y2 AGR) = *3-SING)((Y2 GENDER) = (Y4 GENDER)))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 23

Transfer Rule Formalism (II)

Value constraints

Agreement constraints

;SL: the old man, TL: ha-ish ha-zaqen

NP::NP [DET ADJ N] -> [DET N DET ADJ]((X1::Y1)(X1::Y3)(X2::Y4)(X3::Y2)

((X1 AGR) = *3-SING)((X1 DEF = *DEF)((X3 AGR) = *3-SING)((X3 COUNT) = +)

((Y1 DEF) = *DEF)((Y3 DEF) = *DEF)((Y2 AGR) = *3-SING)((Y2 GENDER) = (Y4 GENDER)))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 24

Rule Learning - Overview

• Goal: Acquire Syntactic Transfer Rules• Use available knowledge from the source

side (grammatical structure)• Three steps:

1. Flat Seed Generation: first guesses at transfer rules; flat syntactic structure

2. Compositionality Learning: use previously learned rules to learn hierarchical structure

3. Constraint Learning: refine rules by learning appropriate feature constraints

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 25

Flat Seed Rule Generation

Learning Example: NP

Eng: the big apple

Heb: ha-tapuax ha-gadol

Generated Seed Rule:

NP::NP [ART ADJ N] [ART N ART ADJ]

((X1::Y1)

(X1::Y3)

(X2::Y4)

(X3::Y2))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 26

Flat Seed Rule Generation

• Create a “flat” transfer rule specific to the sentence pair, partially abstracted to POS– Words that are aligned word-to-word and have the

same POS in both languages are generalized to their POS

– Words that have complex alignments (or not the same POS) remain lexicalized

• One seed rule for each translation example• No feature constraints associated with seed

rules (but mark the example(s) from which it was learned)

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 27

Compositionality LearningInitial Flat Rules: S::S [ART ADJ N V ART N] [ART N ART ADJ V P ART N]

((X1::Y1) (X1::Y3) (X2::Y4) (X3::Y2) (X4::Y5) (X5::Y7) (X6::Y8))

NP::NP [ART ADJ N] [ART N ART ADJ]

((X1::Y1) (X1::Y3) (X2::Y4) (X3::Y2))

NP::NP [ART N] [ART N]

((X1::Y1) (X2::Y2))

Generated Compositional Rule:

S::S [NP V NP] [NP V P NP]

((X1::Y1) (X2::Y2) (X3::Y4))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 28

Compositionality Learning

• Detection: traverse the c-structure of the English sentence, add compositional structure for translatable chunks

• Generalization: adjust constituent sequences and alignments

• Two implemented variants:– Safe Compositionality: there exists a transfer rule

that correctly translates the sub-constituent– Maximal Compositionality: Generalize the rule if

supported by the alignments, even in the absence of an existing transfer rule for the sub-constituent

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 29

Constraint LearningInput: Rules and their Example Sets

S::S [NP V NP] [NP V P NP] {ex1,ex12,ex17,ex26}

((X1::Y1) (X2::Y2) (X3::Y4))

NP::NP [ART ADJ N] [ART N ART ADJ] {ex2,ex3,ex13}

((X1::Y1) (X1::Y3) (X2::Y4) (X3::Y2))

NP::NP [ART N] [ART N] {ex4,ex5,ex6,ex8,ex10,ex11}

((X1::Y1) (X2::Y2))

Output: Rules with Feature Constraints:

S::S [NP V NP] [NP V P NP]

((X1::Y1) (X2::Y2) (X3::Y4)

(X1 NUM = X2 NUM)

(Y1 NUM = Y2 NUM)

(X1 NUM = Y1 NUM))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 30

Constraint Learning

• Goal: add appropriate feature constraints to the acquired rules

• Methodology:– Preserve general structural transfer– Learn specific feature constraints from example set

• Seed rules are grouped into clusters of similar transfer structure (type, constituent sequences, alignments)

• Each cluster forms a version space: a partially ordered hypothesis space with a specific and a general boundary

• The seed rules in a group form the specific boundary of a version space

• The general boundary is the (implicit) transfer rule with the same type, constituent sequences, and alignments, but no feature constraints

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 31

Constraint Learning: Generalization

• The partial order of the version space:Definition: A transfer rule tr1 is strictly more general than another transfer rule tr2 if all f-structures that are satisfied by tr2 are also satisfied by tr1.

• Generalize rules by merging them:– Deletion of constraint– Raising two value constraints to an agreement

constraint, e.g. ((x1 num) = *pl), ((x3 num) = *pl) ((x1 num) = (x3 num))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 32

Automated Rule Refinement

• Bilingual informants can identify translation errors and pinpoint the errors

• A sophisticated trace of the translation path can identify likely sources for the error and do “Blame Assignment”

• Rule Refinement operators can be developed to modify the underlying translation grammar (and lexicon) based on characteristics of the error source:– Add or delete feature constraints from a rule– Bifurcate a rule into two rules (general and specific)– Add or correct lexical entries

• See [Font-Llitjos, Carbonell & Lavie, 2005]

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 33

Outline• Rationale for learning-based MT• Roadmap for learning-based MT• Framework overview• Elicitation• Learning transfer Rules• Automatic rule refinement• Learning Morphology• Example prototypes• Implications for MT with vast parallel data• Conclusions and future directions

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 34

Morphology Learning• Goal: Unsupervised learning of morphemes and their

function from raw monolingual data– Segmentation of words into morphemes– Identification of morphological paradigms (inflections and

derivations)– Learning association between morphemes and their

function in the language• Organize the raw data in the form of a network of

paradigm candidate schemes• Search the network for a collection of schemes that

represent true morphology paradigms of the language• Learn mappings between the schemes and

features/functions using minimal pairs of elicited data• Construct analyzer based on the collection of schemes

and the acquired function mappings

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 35

Ø.sblamesolve

Example Vocabulary

blame blamed blames roamed

roaming roams solve solves solving

Ø.s.dblame

sblameroamsolve

e.esblamsolv

me.mesbla

e.esblamsolv

e.edblam

esblamsolv

Ø.s.dblame

Ø.sblamesolve

Øblameblamesblamedroams

roamedroaming

solvesolvessolving

e.es.edblam

edblamroam

dblameroame

Ø.dblame

s.dblame

sblameroamsolve

es.edblam

eblamsolv

me.mesbla

me.medbla

mesbla

me.mes.medbla

medblaroa

mes.medbla

mebla

36

a.as.o.os43

african, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.o.os.tro1

cas

a.as.os50

afectad, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.o59

cas, citad, jurídic, l, ...

a.o.os105

impuest, indonesi, italian, jurídic, ...

a.as199

huelg, incluid, industri,

inundad, ...

a.os134

impedid, impuest, indonesi,

inundad, ...

as.os68

cas, implicad, inundad, jurídic, ...

a.o214

id, indi, indonesi,

inmediat, ...

as.o85

intern, jurídic, just, l, ...

a.tro2

cas.cen

a1237

huelg, ib, id, iglesi, ...

as404

huelg, huelguist, incluid,

industri, ...

os534

humorístic, human, hígad,

impedid, ...

o1139

hub, hug, human,

huyend, ...

tro16

catas, ce, cen, cua, ...

as.o.os54

cas, implicad, jurídic, l, ...

o.os268

human, implicad, indici,

indocumentad, ...

Spanish Newswire Corpus

40,011 Tokens

6,975 Types

37

a.as.o.os43

african, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.o.os.tro1

cas

a.as.os50

afectad, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.o59

cas, citad, jurídic, l, ...

a.o.os105

impuest, indonesi, italian, jurídic, ...

a.as199

huelg, incluid, industri,

inundad, ...

a.os134

impedid, impuest, indonesi,

inundad, ...

as.os68

cas, implicad, inundad, jurídic, ...

a.o214

id, indi, indonesi,

inmediat, ...

as.o85

intern, jurídic, just, l, ...

a.tro2

cas.cen

a1237

huelg, ib, id, iglesi, ...

as404

huelg, huelguist, incluid,

industri, ...

os534

humorístic, human, hígad,

impedid, ...

o1139

hub, hug, human,

huyend, ...

tro16

catas, ce, cen, cua, ...

as.o.os54

cas, implicad, jurídic, l, ...

o.os268

human, implicad, indici,

indocumentad, ...

C-Suffixes

C-Stems

Level 5 = 5 C-suffixes

C-Stem Type Count

38

a.as.o.os43

african, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.o.os.tro1

cas

a.tro2

cas.cen

tro16

catas, ce, cen, cua, ...

Adjective Inflection Class

39

a.as.os50

afectad, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.o59

cas, citad, jurídic, l, ...

a.o.os105

impuest, indonesi, italian, jurídic, ...

a.as199

huelg, incluid, industri,

inundad, ...

a.os134

impedid, impuest, indonesi,

inundad, ...

as.os68

cas, implicad, inundad, jurídic, ...

a.o214

id, indi, indonesi,

inmediat, ...

as.o85

intern, jurídic, just, l, ...

a1237

huelg, ib, id, iglesi, ...

as404

huelg, huelguist, incluid,

industri, ...

os534

humorístic, human, hígad,

impedid, ...

o1139

hub, hug, human,

huyend, ...

as.o.os54

cas, implicad, jurídic, l, ...

o.os268

human, implicad, indici,

indocumentad, ...

From the spurious c-suffix “tro”

a.as.o.os.tro1

cas

a.tro2

cas.cen

tro16

catas, ce, cen, cua, ...

a.as.o.os43

african, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.os50

afectad, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.o59

cas, citad, jurídic, l, ...

a.o.os105

impuest, indonesi, italian, jurídic, ...

a.as199

huelg, incluid, industri,

inundad, ...

a.os134

impedid, impuest, indonesi,

inundad, ...

as.os68

cas, implicad, inundad, jurídic, ...

a.o214

id, indi, indonesi,

inmediat, ...

as.o85

intern, jurídic, just, l, ...

a1237

huelg, ib, id, iglesi, ...

as404

huelg, huelguist, incluid,

industri, ...

os534

humorístic, human, hígad,

impedid, ...

o1139

hub, hug, human,

huyend, ...

as.o.os54

cas, implicad, jurídic, l, ...

o.os268

human, implicad, indici,

indocumentad, ...

40

De

cre

asin

g C

-Ste

m C

oun

t

Incr

ea

sin

g C

-Su

ffix

Co

unt

Basic Search Procedure

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 41

Outline• Rationale for learning-based MT• Roadmap for learning-based MT• Framework overview• Elicitation• Learning transfer Rules• Automatic rule refinement• Learning Morphology• Example prototypes• Implications for MT with vast parallel data• Conclusions and future directions

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 42

AVENUE Prototypes

• General XFER framework under development for past three years

• Prototype systems so far:– German-to-English, Dutch-to-English– Chinese-to-English– Hindi-to-English– Hebrew-to-English

• In progress or planned:– Mapudungun-to-Spanish– Quechua-to-Spanish– Arabic-to-English– Native-Brazilian languages to Brazilian Portuguese

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 43

Challenges for Hebrew MT

• Puacity in existing language resources for Hebrew– No publicly available broad coverage morphological

analyzer– No publicly available bilingual lexicons or dictionaries– No POS-tagged corpus or parse tree-bank corpus for

Hebrew– No large Hebrew/English parallel corpus

• Scenario well suited for CMU transfer-based MT framework for languages with limited resources

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 44

Hebrew-to-English MT Prototype

• Initial prototype developed within a two month intensive effort

• Accomplished:– Adapted available morphological analyzer– Constructed a preliminary translation lexicon– Translated and aligned Elicitation Corpus– Learned XFER rules– Developed (small) manual XFER grammar as a point

of comparison– System debugging and development– Evaluated performance on unseen test data using

automatic evaluation metrics

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 45

Morphology Example

• Input word: B$WRH

0 1 2 3 4 |--------B$WRH--------| |-----B-----|$WR|--H--| |--B--|-H--|--$WRH---|

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 46

Morphology ExampleY0: ((SPANSTART 0) Y1: ((SPANSTART 0) Y2: ((SPANSTART 1) (SPANEND 4) (SPANEND 2) (SPANEND 3) (LEX B$WRH) (LEX B) (LEX $WR) (POS N) (POS PREP)) (POS N) (GEN F) (GEN M) (NUM S) (NUM S) (STATUS ABSOLUTE)) (STATUS ABSOLUTE))

Y3: ((SPANSTART 3) Y4: ((SPANSTART 0) Y5: ((SPANSTART 1) (SPANEND 4) (SPANEND 1) (SPANEND 2) (LEX $LH) (LEX B) (LEX H) (POS POSS)) (POS PREP)) (POS DET))

Y6: ((SPANSTART 2) Y7: ((SPANSTART 0) (SPANEND 4) (SPANEND 4) (LEX $WRH) (LEX B$WRH) (POS N) (POS LEX)) (GEN F) (NUM S) (STATUS ABSOLUTE))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 47

Sample Output (dev-data)

maxwell anurpung comes from ghana for israel four years ago and since worked in cleaning in hotels in eilat

a few weeks ago announced if management club hotel that for him to leave israel according to the government instructions and immigration police

in a letter in broken english which spread among the foreign workers thanks to them hotel for their hard work and announced that will purchase for hm flight tickets for their countries from their money

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 48

Evaluation Results

• Test set of 62 sentences from Haaretz newspaper, 2 reference translations

System BLEU NIST P R METEOR

No Gram 0.0616 3.4109 0.4090 0.4427 0.3298

Learned 0.0774 3.5451 0.4189 0.4488 0.3478

Manual 0.1026 3.7789 0.4334 0.4474 0.3617

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 49

Outline• Rationale for learning-based MT• Roadmap for learning-based MT• Framework overview• Elicitation• Learning transfer Rules• Automatic rule refinement• Learning Morphology• Example prototypes• Implications for MT with vast parallel data• Conclusions and future directions

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 50

Implications for MT with Vast Amounts of Parallel Data

• Learning word/short-phrase translations vs. learning long phrase-to-phrase translations

• Phrase-to-phrase MT ill suited for long-range reorderings ungrammatical output

• Recent work on hierarchical Stat-MT [Chiang, 2005] and parsing-based MT [Melamed et al, 2005]

• Learning general tree-to-tree syntactic mappings is equally problematic:– Meaning is a hybrid of complex, non-compositional phrases

embedded within a syntactic structure– Some constituents can be translated in isolation, others

require contextual mappings

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 51

Implications for MT with Vast Amounts of Parallel Data

• Our approach for learning transfer rules is applicable to the large data scenario, subject to solutions for several challenges:– No elicitation corpus break-down parallel

sentences into reasonable learning examples– Working with less reliable automatic word alignments

rather than manual alignments– Effective use of reliable parse structures for ONE

language (i.e. English) and automatic word alignments in order to decompose the translation of a sentence into several compositional rules.

– Effective scoring of resulting very large transfer grammars, and scaled up transfer + decoding

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 52

Implications for MT with Vast Amounts of Parallel Data

• Example: 他 经常 与 江泽民 总统 通 电话 He freq with J Zemin Pres via phone

He freq talked with President J Zemin over the phone

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 53

Implications for MT with Vast Amounts of Parallel Data

• Example: 他 经常 与 江泽民 总统 通 电话 He freq with J Zemin Pres via phone

He freq talked with President J Zemin over the phone

NP1

NP1

NP2

NP2

NP3

NP3

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 54

Conclusions• There is hope yet for wide-spread MT between many of

the worlds language pairs• MT offers a fertile yet extremely challenging ground for

learning-based approaches that leverage from diverse sources of information:– Syntactic structure of one or both languages– Word-to-word correspondences– Decomposable units of translation– Statistical Language Models

• Provides a feasible solution to MT for languages with limited resources

• Extremely promising approach for addressing the fundamental weaknesses in current corpus-based MT for languages with vast resources

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 55

Future Research Directions• Automatic Transfer Rule Learning:

– In the “large-data” scenario: from large volumes of uncontrolled parallel text automatically word-aligned

– In the absence of morphology or POS annotated lexica

– Learning mappings for non-compositional structures– Effective models for rule scoring for

• Decoding: using scores at runtime• Pruning the large collections of learned rules

– Learning Unification Constraints

• Integrated Xfer Engine and Decoder– Improved models for scoring tree-to-tree mappings,

integration with LM and other knowledge sources in the course of the search

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 56

Future Research Directions

• Automatic Rule Refinement• Morphology Learning• Feature Detection and Corpus

Navigation• …

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 57

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 58

Mapudungun-to-Spanish Example

Mapudungun

pelafiñ Maria

Spanish

No vi a María

English

I didn’t see Maria

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 59

Mapudungun-to-Spanish Example

Mapudungun

pelafiñ Mariape -la -fi -ñ Mariasee -neg -3.obj -1.subj.indicative Maria

Spanish

No vi a MaríaNo vi a Maríaneg see.1.subj.past.indicative acc Maria

English

I didn’t see Maria

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 60

V

pe

pe-la-fi-ñ Maria

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 61

V

pe

pe-la-fi-ñ Maria

VSuff

laNegation = +

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 62

V

pe

pe-la-fi-ñ Maria

VSuff

la

VSuffGPass all features up

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 63

V

pe

pe-la-fi-ñ Maria

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fiobject person = 3

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 64

V

pe

pe-la-fi-ñ Maria

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffGPass all features up from both children

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 65

V

pe

pe-la-fi-ñ Maria

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

person = 1number = sgmood = ind

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 66

V

pe

pe-la-fi-ñ Maria

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

Pass all features up from both children

VSuffG

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 67

V

V

pe

pe-la-fi-ñ Maria

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

Pass all features up from both children

VSuffGCheck that:1) negation = +2) tense is undefined

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 68

V

pe

pe-la-fi-ñ Maria

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

V NP

N

Maria

N person = 3number = sghuman = +

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 69

Pass features up from

V

pe

pe-la-fi-ñ Maria

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

Check that NP is human = +V VP

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 70

V

pe

Transfer to Spanish: Top-Down

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

VP

S

VP

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 71

V

pe

Transfer to Spanish: Top-Down

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

VP

S

VP

NP“a”V

Pass all features to Spanish side

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 72

V

pe

Transfer to Spanish: Top-Down

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

VP

S

VP

NP“a”V

Pass all features down

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 73

V

pe

Transfer to Spanish: Top-Down

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

VP

S

VP

NP“a”V

Pass object features down

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 74

V

pe

Transfer to Spanish: Top-Down

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

VP

S

VP

NP“a”V

Accusative marker on objects is introduced because human = +

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 75

V

pe

Transfer to Spanish: Top-Down

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

VP

S

VP

NP“a”V

VP::VP [VBar NP] -> [VBar "a" NP]( (X1::Y1)

(X2::Y3)

((X2 type) = (*NOT* personal)) ((X2 human) =c +)

(X0 = X1) ((X0 object) = X2)

(Y0 = X0)

((Y0 object) = (X0 object))(Y1 = Y0)(Y3 = (Y0 object))((Y1 objmarker person) = (Y3 person))((Y1 objmarker number) = (Y3 number))((Y1 objmarker gender) = (Y3 ender)))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 76

V

pe

Transfer to Spanish: Top-Down

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

VP

S

VP

NP“a”V

V“no”

Pass person, number, and mood features to Spanish Verb

Assign tense = past

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 77

V

pe

Transfer to Spanish: Top-Down

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

VP

S

VP

NP“a”V

V“no”

Introduced because negation = +

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 78

V

pe

Transfer to Spanish: Top-Down

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

VP

S

VP

NP“a”V

V“no”

ver

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 79

V

pe

Transfer to Spanish: Top-Down

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

VP

S

VP

NP“a”V

V“no”

vervi

person = 1number = sgmood = indicativetense = past

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 80

V

pe

Transfer to Spanish: Top-Down

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

VP

S

VP

NP“a”V

V“no”

vi N

María

N

Pass features over to Spanish side

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 81

V

pe

I Didn’t see Maria

VSuff

la

VSuffG VSuff

fi

VSuffG VSuff

ñ

VSuffG

NP

N

Maria

N

S

V

VP

S

VP

NP“a”V

V“no”

vi N

María

N

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 82

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 83

Conclusions• Transfer rules (both manual and learned) offer

significant contributions that can complement existing data-driven approaches– Also in medium and large data settings?

• Initial steps to development of a statistically grounded transfer-based MT system with:– Rules that are scored based on a well-founded

probability model – Strong and effective decoding that incorporates the

most advanced techniques used in SMT decoding

• Working from the “opposite” end of research on incorporating models of syntax into “standard” SMT systems [Knight et al]

• Our direction makes sense in the limited data scenario

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 84

Missing Science

• Monolingual learning tasks:– Learning morphology: morphemes and their meaning– Learning syntactic and semantic structures:

grammar induction• Bilingual Learning Tasks:

– Automatic acquisition of word and phrase translation lexicons

– Learning structural mappings (syntactic, semantic, non-compositional)

• Models that effectively combine learned symbolic knowledge with statistical information: new “decoders”

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 85

AVENUE PartnersLanguage Country Institutions

Mapudungun (in place)

Chile Universidad de la Frontera, Institute for Indigenous Studies, Ministry of Education

Quechua(discussion)

Peru Ministry of Education

Aymara(discussion)

Bolivia, Peru Ministry of Education

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 86

The Transfer EngineAnalysis

Source text is parsed into its grammatical structure. Determines transfer application ordering.

Example:

他 看 书。 (he read book)

S

NP VP

N V NP

他 看 书

TransferA target language tree is created by reordering, insertion, and deletion.

S

NP VP

N V NP

he read DET N

a book

Article “a” is inserted into object NP. Source words translated with transfer lexicon.

GenerationTarget language constraints are checked and final translation produced.

E.g. “reads” is chosen over “read” to agree with “he”.

Final translation:

“He reads a book”

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 87

Seeded VSL: Some Open Issues

• Three types of constraints:– X-side constrain applicability of rule– Y-side assist in generation– X-Y transfer features from SL to TL

• Which of the three types improves translation performance?– Use rules without features to populate lattice, decoder will select

the best translation…– Learn only X-Y constraints, based on list of universal projecting

features• Other notions of version-spaces of feature constraints:

– Current feature learning is specific to rules that have identical transfer components

– Important issue during transfer is to disambiguate among rules that have same SL side but different TL side – can we learn effective constraints for this?

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 88

Examples of Learned Rules (Hindi-to-English)

{NP,14244}

;;Score:0.0429

NP::NP [N] -> [DET N]

(

(X1::Y2)

)

{NP,14434}

;;Score:0.0040

NP::NP [ADJ CONJ ADJ N] ->

[ADJ CONJ ADJ N]

(

(X1::Y1) (X2::Y2)

(X3::Y3) (X4::Y4)

)

{PP,4894};;Score:0.0470PP::PP [NP POSTP] -> [PREP NP]((X2::Y1)(X1::Y2))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 89

Transfer Engine

English Language Model

Transfer Rules{NP1,3}NP1::NP1 [NP1 "H" ADJ] -> [ADJ NP1]((X3::Y1) (X1::Y2) ((X1 def) = +) ((X1 status) =c absolute) ((X1 num) = (X3 num)) ((X1 gen) = (X3 gen)) (X0 = X1))

Translation Lexicon

N::N |: ["$WR"] -> ["BULL"]((X1::Y1) ((X0 NUM) = s) ((Y0 lex) = "BULL"))

N::N |: ["$WRH"] -> ["LINE"]((X1::Y1) ((X0 NUM) = s) ((Y0 lex) = "LINE"))

Hebrew Input

בשורה הבאה

Decoder

English Output

in the next line

Translation Output Lattice

(0 1 "IN" @PREP)(1 1 "THE" @DET)(2 2 "LINE" @N)(1 2 "THE LINE" @NP)(0 2 "IN LINE" @PP)(0 4 "IN THE NEXT LINE" @PP)

Preprocessing

Morphology

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 90

Future Directions• Continued work on automatic rule learning (especially

Seeded Version Space Learning)– Use Hebrew and Hindi systems as test platforms for

experimenting with advanced learning research• Rule Refinement via interaction with bilingual speakers• Developing a well-founded model for assigning scores

(probabilities) to transfer rules• Redesigning and improving decoder to better fit the

specific characteristics of the XFER model• Improved leveraging from manual grammar resources• MEMT with improved

– Combination of output from different translation engines with different confidence scores

– strong decoding capabilities

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 91

Seeded Version Space Learning

NP v det n NP VP …1. Group seed rules into version spaces as above.2. Make use of partial order of rules in version space. Partial order is defined

via the f-structures satisfying the constraints.3. Generalize in the space by repeated merging of rules:

1. Deletion of constraint2. Moving value constraints to agreement constraints, e.g.

((x1 num) = *pl), ((x3 num) = *pl) ((x1 num) = (x3 num)

4. Check translation power of generalized rules against sentence pairs

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 92

Seeded Version Space Learning:The Search

• The Seeded Version Space algorithm itself is the repeated generalization of rules by merging

• A merge is successful if the set of sentences that can correctly be translated with the merged rule is a superset of the union of sets that can be translated with the unmerged rules, i.e. check power of rule

• Merge until no more successful merges

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 93

AVENUE Architecture

User

Learning Module

ElicitationProcess

TransferRule

Learning

TransferRules

Run-Time Module

SLInput

SL Parser

TransferEngine

TLGenerator

TLOutputDecoder

MorphologyPre-proc

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 94

Learning Transfer-Rules for Languages with Limited Resources

• Rationale:– Large bilingual corpora not available– Bilingual native informant(s) can translate and align a

small pre-designed elicitation corpus, using elicitation tool– Elicitation corpus designed to be typologically

comprehensive and compositional– Transfer-rule engine and new learning approach support

acquisition of generalized transfer-rules from the data

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 95

The Transfer EngineAnalysis

Source text is parsed into its grammatical structure. Determines transfer application ordering.

Example:

他 看 书。 (he read book)

S

NP VP

N V NP

他 看 书

TransferA target language tree is created by reordering, insertion, and deletion.

S

NP VP

N V NP

he read DET N

a book

Article “a” is inserted into object NP. Source words translated with transfer lexicon.

GenerationTarget language constraints are checked and final translation produced.

E.g. “reads” is chosen over “read” to agree with “he”.

Final translation:

“He reads a book”

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 96

Transfer Rule Formalism

Type informationPart-of-speech/constituent

informationAlignments

x-side constraints

y-side constraints

xy-constraints, e.g. ((Y1 AGR) = (X1 AGR))

;SL: the man, TL: der Mann

NP::NP [DET N] -> [DET N]((X1::Y1)(X2::Y2)

((X1 AGR) = *3-SING)((X1 DEF = *DEF)((X2 AGR) = *3-SING)((X2 COUNT) = +)

((Y1 AGR) = *3-SING)((Y1 DEF) = *DEF)((Y2 AGR) = *3-SING)((Y2 GENDER) = (Y1 GENDER)))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 97

Transfer Rule Formalism (II)

Value constraints

Agreement constraints

;SL: the man, TL: der MannNP::NP [DET N] -> [DET N]((X1::Y1)(X2::Y2)

((X1 AGR) = *3-SING)((X1 DEF = *DEF)((X2 AGR) = *3-SING)((X2 COUNT) = +)

((Y1 AGR) = *3-SING)((Y1 DEF) = *DEF)((Y2 AGR) = *3-SING)((Y2 GENDER) = (Y1 GENDER)))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 98

Rule Learning - Overview

• Goal: Acquire Syntactic Transfer Rules• Use available knowledge from the source

side (grammatical structure)• Three steps:

1. Flat Seed Generation: first guesses at transfer rules; flat syntactic structure

2. Compositionality: use previously learned rules to add hierarchical structure

3. Seeded Version Space Learning: refine rules by generalizing with validation (learn appropriate feature constraints)

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 99

Examples of Learned Rules (I){NP,14244}

;;Score:0.0429

NP::NP [N] -> [DET N]

(

(X1::Y2)

)

{NP,14434}

;;Score:0.0040

NP::NP [ADJ CONJ ADJ N] ->

[ADJ CONJ ADJ N]

(

(X1::Y1) (X2::Y2)

(X3::Y3) (X4::Y4)

)

{PP,4894};;Score:0.0470PP::PP [NP POSTP] -> [PREP NP]((X2::Y1)(X1::Y2))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 100

A Limited Data Scenario for Hindi-to-English

• Put together a scenario with “miserly” data resources:– Elicited Data corpus: 17589 phrases– Cleaned portion (top 12%) of LDC dictionary: ~2725

Hindi words (23612 translation pairs)– Manually acquired resources during the SLE:

• 500 manual bigram translations• 72 manually written phrase transfer rules• 105 manually written postposition rules• 48 manually written time expression rules

• No additional parallel text!!

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 101

Manual Grammar Development

• Covers mostly NPs, PPs and VPs (verb complexes)

• ~70 grammar rules, covering basic and recursive NPs and PPs, verb complexes of main tenses in Hindi (developed in two weeks)

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 102

Manual Transfer Rules: Example;; PASSIVE OF SIMPLE PAST (NO AUX) WITH LIGHT VERB;; passive of 43 (7b){VP,28}VP::VP : [V V V] -> [Aux V]( (X1::Y2) ((x1 form) = root) ((x2 type) =c light) ((x2 form) = part) ((x2 aspect) = perf) ((x3 lexwx) = 'jAnA') ((x3 form) = part) ((x3 aspect) = perf) (x0 = x1) ((y1 lex) = be) ((y1 tense) = past) ((y1 agr num) = (x3 agr num)) ((y1 agr pers) = (x3 agr pers)) ((y2 form) = part))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 103

Manual Transfer Rules: Example

; NP1 ke NP2 -> NP2 of NP1; Ex: jIvana ke eka aXyAya; life of (one) chapter ; ==> a chapter of life;{NP,12}NP::NP : [PP NP1] -> [NP1 PP]( (X1::Y2) (X2::Y1); ((x2 lexwx) = 'kA'))

{NP,13}NP::NP : [NP1] -> [NP1]( (X1::Y1))

{PP,12}PP::PP : [NP Postp] -> [Prep NP]( (X1::Y2) (X2::Y1))

NP

PP NP1

NP P Adj N

N1 ke eka aXyAya

N

jIvana

NP

NP1 PP

Adj N P NP

one chapter of N1

N

life

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 104

Adding a “Strong” Decoder

• XFER system produces a full lattice• Edges are scored using word-to-word

translation probabilities, trained from the limited bilingual data

• Decoder uses an English LM (70m words)• Decoder can also reorder words or phrases (up

to 4 positions ahead)• For XFER(strong) , ONLY edges from basic XFER

system are used!

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 105

Testing Conditions

• Tested on section of JHU provided data: 258 sentences with four reference translations– SMT system (stand-alone)– EBMT system (stand-alone)– XFER system (naïve decoding)– XFER system with “strong” decoder

• No grammar rules (baseline)• Manually developed grammar rules• Automatically learned grammar rules

– XFER+SMT with strong decoder (MEMT)

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 106

Results on JHU Test Set (very miserly training data)System BLEU M-BLEU NIST

EBMT 0.058 0.165 4.22

SMT 0.093 0.191 4.64

XFER (naïve) man grammar

0.055 0.177 4.46

XFER (strong)

no grammar0.109 0.224 5.29

XFER (strong) learned grammar

0.116 0.231 5.37

XFER (strong) man grammar

0.135 0.243 5.59

XFER+SMT 0.136 0.243 5.65

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 107

Effect of Reordering in the Decoder

NIST vs. Reordering

4.8

4.9

5

5.1

5.2

5.3

5.4

5.5

5.6

5.7

0 1 2 3 4

reordering window

NIS

T s

core no grammar

learned grammar

manual grammar

MEMT: SFXER+ SMT

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 108

Observations and Lessons (I)• XFER with strong decoder outperformed SMT even

without any grammar rules in the miserly data scenario– SMT Trained on elicited phrases that are very short– SMT has insufficient data to train more discriminative

translation probabilities– XFER takes advantage of Morphology

• Token coverage without morphology: 0.6989• Token coverage with morphology: 0.7892

• Manual grammar currently somewhat better than automatically learned grammar– Learned rules did not yet use version-space learning– Large room for improvement on learning rules – Importance of effective well-founded scoring of learned rules

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 109

Observations and Lessons (II)

• MEMT (XFER and SMT) based on strong decoder produced best results in the miserly scenario.

• Reordering within the decoder provided very significant score improvements– Much room for more sophisticated grammar rules– Strong decoder can carry some of the reordering

“burden”

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 110

Conclusions• Transfer rules (both manual and learned) offer

significant contributions that can complement existing data-driven approaches– Also in medium and large data settings?

• Initial steps to development of a statistically grounded transfer-based MT system with:– Rules that are scored based on a well-founded

probability model – Strong and effective decoding that incorporates the

most advanced techniques used in SMT decoding

• Working from the “opposite” end of research on incorporating models of syntax into “standard” SMT systems [Knight et al]

• Our direction makes sense in the limited data scenario

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 111

Future Directions• Continued work on automatic rule learning

(especially Seeded Version Space Learning)• Improved leveraging from manual grammar

resources, interaction with bilingual speakers• Developing a well-founded model for assigning

scores (probabilities) to transfer rules• Improving the strong decoder to better fit the

specific characteristics of the XFER model• MEMT with improved

– Combination of output from different translation engines with different scorings

– strong decoding capabilities

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 112

Rule Learning - Overview

• Goal: Acquire Syntactic Transfer Rules• Use available knowledge from the source

side (grammatical structure)• Three steps:

1. Flat Seed Generation: first guesses at transfer rules; no syntactic structure

2. Compositionality: use previously learned rules to add structure

3. Seeded Version Space Learning: refine rules by generalizing with validation

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 113

Flat Seed Generation

Create a transfer rule that is specific to the sentence pair, but abstracted to the POS level. No syntactic structure.

Element Source

SL POS sequence f-structure

TL POS sequence TL dictionary, aligned SL words

Type information corpus, same on SL and TL

Alignments informant

x-side constraints f-structure

y-side constraints TL dictionary, aligned SL words (list of projecting features)

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 114

Flat Seed Generation - Example

The highly qualified applicant did not accept the offer.Der äußerst qualifizierte Bewerber nahm das Angebot nicht an.

((1,1),(2,2),(3,3),(4,4),(6,8),(7,5),(7,9),(8,6),(9,7))

S::S [det adv adj n aux neg v det n] -> [det adv adj n v det n neg vpart](;;alignments:(x1:y1)(x2::y2)(x3::y3)(x4::y4)(x6::y8)(x7::y5)(x7::y9)(x8::y6)(x9::y7));;constraints:((x1 def) = *+) ((x4 agr) = *3-sing) ((x5 tense) = *past) …. ((y1 def) = *+) ((y3 case) = *nom) ((y4 agr) = *3-sing) …. )

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 115

Compositionality - Overview

• Traverse the c-structure of the English sentence, add compositional structure for translatable chunks

• Adjust constituent sequences, alignments• Remove unnecessary constraints, i.e. those

that are contained in the lower-level rule• Adjust constraints: use f-structure of correct

translation vs. f-structure of incorrect translations to introduce context constraints

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 116

Compositionality - Example

S::S [det adv adj n aux neg v det n] -> [det adv adj n v det n neg vpart](;;alignments:(x1:y1)(x2::y2)(x3::y3)(x4::y4)(x6::y8)(x7::y5)(x7::y9)(x8::y6)(x9::y7));;constraints:((x1 def) = *+) ((x4 agr) = *3-sing) ((x5 tense) = *past) …. ((y1 def) = *+) ((y3 case) = *nom) ((y4 agr) = *3-sing) …. )

S::S [NP aux neg v det n] -> [NP v det n neg vpart](;;alignments:(x1::y1)(x3::y5)(x4::y2)(x4::y6)(x5::y3)(x6::y4);;constraints:((x2 tense) = *past) …. ((y1 def) = *+) ((y1 case) = *nom) …. )

NP::NP [det AJDP n]-> [det ADJP n]

((x1::y1)…((y3 agr) = *3-sing)((x3 agr = *3-sing)

….)

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 117

Seeded Version Space Learning: Overview

• Goal: further generalize the acquired rules• Methodology:

– Preserve general structural transfer– Consider relaxing specific feature constraints

• Seed rules are grouped into clusters of similar transfer structure (type, constituent sequences, alignments)

• Each cluster forms a version space: a partially ordered hypothesis space with a specific and a general boundary

• The seed rules in a group form the specific boundary of a version space

• The general boundary is the (implicit) transfer rule with the same type, constituent sequences, and alignments, but no feature constraints

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 118

Seeded Version Space Learning

NP v det n NP VP …1. Group seed rules into version spaces as above.2. Make use of partial order of rules in version space. Partial order is defined

via the f-structures satisfying the constraints.3. Generalize in the space by repeated merging of rules:

1. Deletion of constraint2. Moving value constraints to agreement constraints, e.g.

((x1 num) = *pl), ((x3 num) = *pl) ((x1 num) = (x3 num)

4. Check translation power of generalized rules against sentence pairs

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 119

Seeded Version Space Learning: Example

S::S [NP aux neg v det n] -> [NP v det n neg vpart](;;alignments:(x1::y1)(x3::y5)(x4::y2)(x4::y6)(x5::y3)(x6::y4);;constraints:((x2 tense) = *past) …. ((y1 def) = *+) ((y1 case) = *nom) ((y1 agr) = *3-sing) … )((y3 agr) = *3-sing) ((y4 agr) = *3-sing)… )

S::S [NP aux neg v det n] -> [NP v det n neg vpart](;;alignments:(x1::y1)(x3::y5)(x4::y2)(x4::y6)(x5::y3)(x6::y4);;constraints:((x2 tense) = *past) …((y1 def) = *+) ((y1 case) = *nom) ((y1 agr) = *3-plu) …((y3 agr) = *3-plu) ((y4 agr) = *3-plu)… )

S::S[NP aux neg v det n] -> [NP n det n neg vpart](;;alignments:(x1::y1)(x3::y5)(x4::y2)(x4::y6)(x5::y3)(x6::y4);;constraints:((x2 tense) = *past) …((y1 def) = *+) ((y1 case) = *nom)((y4 agr) = (y3 agr))… )

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 120

Preliminary Evaluation

• English to German• Corpus of 141 ADJPs, simple NPs and

sentences• 10-fold cross-validation experiment• Goals:

– Do we learn useful transfer rules?– Does Compositionality improve

generalization?– Does VS-learning improve generalization?

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 121

Summary of Results

• Average translation accuracy on cross-validation test set was 62%

• Without VS-learning: 43%• Without Compositionality: 57%• Average number of VSs: 24• Average number of sents per VS: 3.8• Average number of merges per VS: 1.6• Percent of compositional rules: 34%

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 122

Conclusions

• New paradigm for learning transfer rules from pre-designed elicitation corpus

• Geared toward languages with very limited resources

• Preliminary experiments validate approach: compositionality and VS-learning improve generalization

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 123

Future Work

1. Larger, more diverse elicitation corpus2. Additional languages (Mapudungun…)3. Less information on TL side4. Reverse translation direction5. Refine the various algorithms:

• Operators for VS generalization• Generalization VS search• Layers for compositionality

6. User interactive verification

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 124

Seeded Version Space Learning: Generalization

• The partial order of the version space:Definition: A transfer rule tr1 is strictly more general than another transfer rule tr2 if all f-structures that are satisfied by tr2 are also satisfied by tr1.

• Generalize rules by merging them:– Deletion of constraint– Raising two value constraints to an agreement

constraint, e.g. ((x1 num) = *pl), ((x3 num) = *pl) ((x1 num) = (x3 num))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 125

Seeded Version Space Learning: Merging Two Rules

Merging algorithm proceeds in three steps. To merge tr1 and tr2 into trmerged:

1. Copy all constraints that are both in tr1 and tr2 into trmerged

2. Consider tr1 and tr2 separately. For the remaining constraints in tr1 and tr2 , perform all possible instances of raising value constraints to agreement constraints.

3. Repeat step 1.

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 126

Seeded Version Space Learning:The Search

• The Seeded Version Space algorithm itself is the repeated generalization of rules by merging

• A merge is successful if the set of sentences that can correctly be translated with the merged rule is a superset of the union of sets that can be translated with the unmerged rules, i.e. check power of rule

• Merge until no more successful merges

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 127

Constructing a Network of Candidate Pattern Sets (An Example)

Example Vocabulary

blame blamed blames roamed

roaming roams solve solves solving

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 128

Ø.sblamesolve

Example Vocabulary

blame blamed blames roamed

roaming roams solve solves solving

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 129

Ø.sblamesolve

Ø.s.dblame

Example Vocabulary

blame blamed blames roamed

roaming roams solve solves solving

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 130

Ø.sblamesolve

Ø.s.dblame

Example Vocabulary

blame blamed blames roamed

roaming roams solve solves solving

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 131

Ø.sblamesolve

Ø.s.dblame

sblameroamsolve

Example Vocabulary

blame blamed blames roamed

roaming roams solve solves solving

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 132

Ø.sblamesolve

Ø.s.dblame

sblameroamsolve

Example Vocabulary

blame blamed blames roamed

roaming roams solve solves solving

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 133

Ø.sblamesolve

Ø.s.dblame

sblameroamsolve

e.esblamsolv

Example Vocabulary

blame blamed blames roamed

roaming roams solve solves solving

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 134

Ø.sblamesolve

Example Vocabulary

blame blamed blames roamed

roaming roams solve solves solving

Ø.s.dblame

sblameroamsolve

e.esblamsolv

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 135

Ø.sblamesolve

Example Vocabulary

blame blamed blames roamed

roaming roams solve solves solving

Ø.s.dblame

sblameroamsolve

e.esblamsolv

me.mesbla

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 136

Add Test to the Generate• Finite state hub searching

algorithm (Johnson and Martin, 2003) can weed out unlikely morpheme boundaries to speed up network generation

m

t

t

i n g

s

Ø

m

t

t

z

r

e

o

s

t

a

y

e

a

a

n gi

Ø

r i e s

t.ting.tsres

retrea

Ø.ing.srest

retreatroam

t.tingres

retrea

Ø.ingrest

retreatretryroam

136

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 137

as404

huelg, huelguist, incluid,

industri, ...

a.as.o.os43

african, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.o.os.tro1

cas

a.as.os50

afectad, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.o59

cas, citad, jurídic, l, ...

a.o.os105

impuest, indonesi, italian, jurídic, ...

a.as199

huelg, incluid, industri,

inundad, ...

a.os134

impedid, impuest, indonesi,

inundad, ...

as.os68

cas, implicad, inundad, jurídic, ...

a.o214

id, indi, indonesi,

inmediat, ...

as.o85

intern, jurídic, just, l, ...

a.tro2

cas.cen

a1237

huelg, ib, id, iglesi, ...

os534

humorístic, human, hígad,

impedid, ...

o1139

hub, hug, human,

huyend, ...

tro16

catas, ce, cen, cua, ...

as.o.os54

cas, implicad, jurídic, l, ...

o.os268

human, implicad, indici,

indocumentad, ...

Each c-suffix is a random variable with a value equal to the count of the c-stems that occur with that suffix

Use Χ2 Test:

Reject hypothesis: a ┴ as (p-value << 0.005)

Accept hypothesis: a ┴ tro (p-value = 0.2)

137

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 138

Weight c-stems by:

Length,

Length of longest c-suffix that attaches

Frequency

Currently each c-stem is implicitly weighted equal

a.as.o.os.tro1

cas

a.tro2

cas.cen

tro16

catas, ce, cen, cua, ...

a.as.o.os43

african, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.os50

afectad, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.o59

cas, citad, jurídic, l, ...

a.o.os105

impuest, indonesi, italian, jurídic, ...

a.as199

huelg, incluid, industri,

inundad, ...

a.os134

impedid, impuest, indonesi,

inundad, ...

as.os68

cas, implicad, inundad, jurídic, ...

a.o214

id, indi, indonesi,

inmediat, ...

as.o85

intern, jurídic, just, l, ...

a1237

huelg, ib, id, iglesi, ...

as404

huelg, huelguist, incluid,

industri, ...

os534

humorístic, human, hígad,

impedid, ...

o1139

hub, hug, human,

huyend, ...

as.o.os54

cas, implicad, jurídic, l, ...

o.os268

human, implicad, indici,

indocumentad, ...

138

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 139

Some schemes absent from this network (i.e. a.os.tro)

Sub-network density:Every descendent of a.as.o.os is in the network—Not true for a.as.o.os.tro

a.as.o.os.tro1

cas

a.tro2

cas.cen

tro16

catas, ce, cen, cua, ...

a.as.o.os43

african, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.os50

afectad, cas, jurídic, l, ...

a.as.o59

cas, citad, jurídic, l, ...

a.o.os105

impuest, indonesi, italian, jurídic, ...

a.as199

huelg, incluid, industri,

inundad, ...

a.os134

impedid, impuest, indonesi,

inundad, ...

as.os68

cas, implicad, inundad, jurídic, ...

a.o214

id, indi, indonesi,

inmediat, ...

as.o85

intern, jurídic, just, l, ...

a1237

huelg, ib, id, iglesi, ...

as404

huelg, huelguist, incluid,

industri, ...

os534

humorístic, human, hígad,

impedid, ...

o1139

hub, hug, human,

huyend, ...

as.o.os54

cas, implicad, jurídic, l, ...

o.os268

human, implicad, indici,

indocumentad, ...

139

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 140

Word-to-Morpheme Segmentation

• De facto standard measure for unsupervised morphology induction

• Prerequisite for many NLP tasks– Machine Translation– Speech Recognition of highly inflecting

languages

140

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 141

S

NP VP

VDet N

The trees fell

Los cayeronárboles

S

NP VP

VDet N

The tree fell

El cayóárbol

Subject number marked on:• N-head (es)• dependent Det (El vs. Los), and • governing V (ó vs eron)

((TENSE past) (LEXICAL-ASPECT activity) ... (SUBJ ((NUM sg) (PERSON 3sg) ...)))

((TENSE past) (LEXICAL-ASPECT activity) ... (SUBJ ((NUM pl) (PERSON 3sg) ...)))

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 142

Ø.ed.ly11cleardirectpresentquiet…

Ø.ed.ing.ly6clearopenpresentTotal

ed.ly12bodiclearcorrectquiet…

Ø.ed.ing.ly.s4clearopen…

Ø.ed.ing201aidcleardefenddeliver…

d.ded.ding27aiboardefen…

d.ded.ding.ds19adboardefen…

Ø.ed.ing.s106cleardefendopenpresent…

Morphology LearningAVENUE Approach:

•Organize the raw data in the form of a network of paradigm candidate schemes•Search the network for a collection of schemes that represent true morphology paradigms of the language•Learn mappings between the schemes and features/functions using minimal pairs of elicited data•Construct analyzer based on the collection of schemes and the acquired function mappings

Nov 17, 2005 Learning-based MT 143

a.as.o.os43

africancasjurídicl...

a.as.i.o.os.sandra.tanier.ter.tro.trol

1cas

a.as.os50

afectadcasjurídicl...

a.as.o59cascitadjurídicl...

a.o.os105impuestindonesiitalianjurídic...

a.as199huelgincluidindustriinundad...

a.os134impedidimpuestindonesiinundad...

as.os68cas

implicadinundadjurídic...

a.o214idindi

indonesiinmediat...

as.o85internjurídicjustl...

a.tro2cascen

a1237huelgibidiglesi...

as404huelghuelguistincluidindustri...

os534

humorístichumanhígadimpedid...

o1139hubhughumanhuyend...

tro16catascecencua...

as.o.os54cas

implicadjurídicl...

Figure : Hierarchical scheme lattice automatically derived from a Spanish newswire corpus of 40,011 words and 6,975 unique types.

o.os268humanimplicadindici

indocumentad...