Skip to main content

Learning Word Alignment Models for Kazakh-English Machine Translation

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Integrated Uncertainty in Knowledge Modelling and Decision Making (IUKM 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9376))

Abstract

In this paper, we address to the most essential challenges in the word alignment quality. Word alignment is a widely used phenomenon in the field of machine translation. However, a small research has been dedicated to the revealing of its discrete properties. This paper presents word segmentation, the probability distributions, and the statistical properties of word alignment in the transparent and a real life dataset. The result suggests that there is no single best method for alignment evaluation. For Kazakh-English pair we attempted to improve the phrase tables with the choice of alignment method, which need to be adapted to the requirements in the specific project. Experimental results show that the processed parallel data reduced word alignment error rate and achieved the highest BLEU improvement on the random parallel corpora.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Bekbulatov, E., Kartbayev, A.: A study of certain morphological structures of Kazakh and their impact on the machine translation quality. In: IEEE 8th International Conference on Application of Information and Communication Technologies, Astana, pp. 1–5 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Oflazer, K., El-Kahlout, D.: Exploring different representational units in English-to-Turkish statistical machine translation. In: 2nd Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, Prague, pp. 25–32 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bisazza, A., Federico, M.: Morphological pre-processing for Turkish to English statistical machine translation. In: International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation 2009, Tokyo, pp. 129–135 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Moore, R.: Improving IBM word alignment model 1. In: 42nd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, Barcelona, pp. 518–525 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Brown, P.F., Della Pietra, V.J., Della Pietra, S.A., Mercer, R.L.: The mathematics of statistical machine translation: Parameter estimation. Computational Linguistics 19, 263–311 (1993). MIT Press Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  6. Vogel, S., Ney, H., Tillmann, C.: HMM-based word alignment in statistical translation. In: 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Copenhagen, pp. 836–841 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Dempster, A., Laird, N., Rubin, D.: Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM algorithm. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B 39, 1–38 (1977). Wiley-Blackwell, UK

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  8. Creutz, M., Lagus, K.: Unsupervised models for morpheme segmentation and morphology learning. ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing 4, article 3. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Beesley, K.R., Karttunen, L.: Finite State Morphology. CSLI Publications, Palo Alto (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Goldsmith, J.: Unsupervised learning of the morphology of a natural language. Computational Linguistics 27, 153–198 (2001). MIT Press Cambridge, MA

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  11. Altenbek, G., Xiao-Long, W.: Kazakh segmentation system of inflectional affixes. In: CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing, Beijing, pp. 183–190 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Kairakbay, B.: A nominal paradigm of the Kazakh language. In: 11th International Conference on Finite State Methods and Natural Language Processing, St. Andrews, pp. 108–112 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Lindén, K., Axelson, E., Hardwick, S., Pirinen, T.A., Silfverberg, M.: HFST—framework for compiling and applying morphologies. In: Mahlow, C., Piotrowski, M. (eds.) SFCM 2011. CCIS, vol. 100, pp. 67–85. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Och, F.J., Ney, H.: A Systematic Comparison of Various Statistical Alignment Models. Computational Linguistics 29, 19–51 (2003). MIT Press Cambridge, MA

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  15. Papineni, K., Roukos, S., Ward, T., Zhu, W.: BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. In: 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Philadephia, pp. 311–318 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Dunning, T.: Accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence. Computational Linguistics 19, 61–64 (1993). MIT Press Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  17. Gabrilovich, E., Markovitch, S.: Computing semantic relatedness using wikipedia-based explicit semantic analysis. In: 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Hyderabad, pp. 1606–1611 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Koehn, P., Hoang, H., Birch, A., Callison-Burch, C., Federico, M., Bertoldi, N., Cowan, B., Shen, W., Moran, C., Zens, R., Dyer, C., Bojar, O., Constantin, A., Herbst, E.: Moses: open source toolkit for statistical machine translation. In: 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Prague, pp. 177–180 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Tapias, D., Rosner, M., Piperidis, S., Odjik, J., Mariani, J., Maegaard, B., Choukri, K., Calzolari, N.: MultiUN: a multilingual corpus from united nation documents. In: Seventh Conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation, La Valletta, pp. 868–872 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Och, F.J.: Minimum error rate training in statistical machine translation. In: 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sapporo, pp. 160–167 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Federico, M., Bertoldi, N., Cettolo, M.: IRSTLM: an open source toolkit for handling large scale language models. In: Interspeech 2008, Brisbane, pp. 1618–1621 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Heafield, K.: Kenlm: faster and smaller language model queries. In: Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, Edinburgh, pp. 187–197 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Clark, J.H., Dyer, C., Lavie, A., Smith, N.A.: Better hypothesis testing for statistical machine translation: controlling for optimizer instability. In: 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Portland, pp. 176–181 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Snover, M., Dorr, B., Schwartz, R., Micciulla, L., Makhoul, J.: A study of translation edit rate with targeted human annotation. In: Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, Cambridge, pp. 223–231 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Denkowski, M., Lavie, A.: Meteor 1.3: automatic metric for reliable optimization and evaluation of machine translation systems. In: Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation EMNLP 2011, Edinburgh, pp. 85–91 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amandyk Kartbayev .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Kartbayev, A. (2015). Learning Word Alignment Models for Kazakh-English Machine Translation. In: Huynh, VN., Inuiguchi, M., Demoeux, T. (eds) Integrated Uncertainty in Knowledge Modelling and Decision Making. IUKM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9376. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25135-6_31

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25135-6_31

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-25134-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-25135-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics