Statistical Machine Translation:

the basic, the novel, and the speculative

Philipp Koehn, University of Edinburgh

4 April 2006

Philipp Koehn SMT Tutorial 4 April 2006

The Basic
• Translating with data
– how can computers learn from translated text?
– what translated material is out there?
– is it enough? how much is needed?
• Statistical modeling
– framing translation as a generative statistical process
• EM Training
– how do we automatically discover hidden data?
• Decoding
– algorithm for translation

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The Novel
• Automatic evaluation methods
– can computers decide what are good translations?
• Phrase-based models
– what are atomic units of translation?
– the best method in statistical machine translation
• Discriminative training
– what are the methods that directly optimize translation performance?

Philipp Koehn SMT Tutorial 4 April 2006

The Speculative
• Syntax-based transfer models
– how can we build models that take advantage of syntax?
– how can we ensure that the output is grammatical?
• Factored translation models
– how can we integrate different levels of abstraction?

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The Rosetta Stone

• Egyptian language was a mystery for centuries

• 1799 a stone with Egyptian text and its translation into Greek was found
⇒ Humans could learn how to translated Egyptian

Philipp Koehn SMT Tutorial 4 April 2006

Parallel Data
• Lots of translated text available: 100s of million words of translated text for
some language pairs
– a book has a few 100,000s words
– an educated person may read 10,000 words a day
→ 3.5 million words a year
→ 300 million a lifetime
→ soon computers will be able to see more translated text than humans read
in a lifetime
⇒ Machine can learn how to translated foreign languages

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Statistical Machine Translation

• Components: Translation model, language model, decoder
foreign/English English
parallel text text

statistical analysis statistical analysis

Translation Language
Model Model

Decoding Algorithm

Philipp Koehn SMT Tutorial 4 April 2006

Word-Based Models
Mary did not slap the green witch
n(3|slap)
Mary not slap slap slap the green witch
p-null
Mary not slap slap slap NULL the green witch
t(la|the)
Maria no daba una botefada a la verde bruja
d(4|4)
Maria no daba una bofetada a la bruja verde

[from Knight, 1997]

• Translation process is decomposed into smaller steps,
each is tied to words
• Original models for statistical machine translation [Brown et al., 1993]

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Phrase-Based Models
Morgen fliege ich nach Kanada zur Konferenz

Tomorrow I will fly to the conference in Canada

[from Koehn et al., 2003, NAACL]

• Foreign input is segmented in phrases
– any sequence of words, not necessarily linguistically motivated
• Each phrase is translated into English
• Phrases are reordered

Philipp Koehn SMT Tutorial 4 April 2006

Syntax-Based Models
VB VB

PRP VB1 VB2

reorder PRP VB2 VB1

he adores VB TO he TO VB adores

listening TO MN MN TO listening

to music music to

VB VB
insert
PRP VB2 VB1 PRP VB2 VB1

he ha TO VB ga adores desu kare ha TO VB ga daisuki desu

MN TO listening no MN TO kiku no
translate
music to ongaku wo

take leaves
Kare ha ongaku wo kiku no ga daisuki desu
[from Yamada and Knight, 2001]

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Language Models
• Language models indicate, whether a sentence is good English
– p(Tomorrow I will fly to the conference) = high
– p(Tomorrow fly me at a summit) = low
→ ensures fluent output by guiding word choice and word order
• Standard: trigram language models
p(Tomorrow|START) ×
p(I|START,Tomorrow) ×
p(will|Tomorrow,I) ×
...
p(Canada|conference,in) ×
p(END|in,Canada) ×
• Often estimated using additional monolingual data (billions of words)

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Automatic Evaluation
• Why automatic evaluation metrics?
– Manual evaluation is too slow
– Evaluation on large test sets reveals minor improvements
– Automatic tuning to improve machine translation performance
• History
– Word Error Rate
– BLEU since 2002
• BLEU in short: Overlap with reference translations

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Automatic Evaluation
• Reference Translation
– the gunman was shot to death by the police .
• System Translations
– the gunman was police kill .
– wounded police jaya of
– the gunman was shot dead by the police .
– the gunman arrested by police kill .
– the gunmen were killed .
– the gunman was shot to death by the police .
– gunmen were killed by police ?SUB>0 ?SUB>0
– al by the police .
– the ringer is killed by the police .
– police killed the gunman .
• Matches
– green = 4 gram match (good!)
– red = word not matched (bad!)

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Automatic Evaluation

[from George Doddington, NIST]

• BLEU correlates with human judgement
– multiple reference translations may be used

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Correlation? [Callison-Burch et al., 2006]

4 4
Adequacy Fluency
Correlation Correlation

3.5 3.5
Human Score

Human Score
3 3

2.5 2.5

2 2
0.38 0.4 0.42 0.44 0.46 0.48 0.5 0.52 0.38 0.4 0.42 0.44 0.46 0.48 0.5 0.52
Bleu Score Bleu Score
[from Callison-Burch et al., 2006, EACL]
• DARPA/NIST MT Eval 2005
– Mostly statistical systems (all but one in graphs)
– One submission manual post-edit of statistical system’s output
→ Good adequacy/fluency scores not reflected by BLEU

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Correlation? [Callison-Burch et al., 2006]

4.5
Adequacy
Fluency
4
SMT System 1
Rule-based System
(Systran)
Human Score

3.5

SMT System 2
2.5

2
0.18 0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3
Bleu Score

[from Callison-Burch et al., 2006, EACL]

• Comparison of
– good statistical system: high BLEU, high adequacy/fluency
– bad statistical sys. (trained on less data): low BLEU, low adequacy/fluency
– Systran: lowest BLEU score, but high adequacy/fluency

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Automatic Evaluation: Outlook

• Research questions
– why does BLEU fail Systran and manual post-edits?
– how can this overcome with novel evaluation metrics?
• Future of automatic methods
– automatic metrics too useful to be abandoned
– evidence still supports that during system development, a better BLEU
indicates a better system
– final assessment has to be human judgement

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Competitions
• Progress driven by MT Competitions
– NIST/DARPA: Yearly campaigns for Arabic-English, Chinese-English,
newstexts, since 2001
– IWSLT: Yearly competitions for Asian languages and Arabic into English,
speech travel domain, since 2003
– WPT/WMT: Yearly competitions for European languages, European
Parliament proceedings, since 2005
• Increasing number of statistical MT groups participate
• Competitions won by statistical systems

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Competitions: Good or Bad?

• Pro:
– public forum for demonstrating the state of the art
– open data sets and evaluation metrics allow for comparison of methods
– credibility for a new approach by doing well
– sharing of ideas and implementation details
• Con:
– winning competition is mostly due to better engineering
– having more data and faster machines plays a role
– limit research to few directions (re-engineering of other’s methods)

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Euromatrix
• Proceedings of the European Parliament
– translated into 11 official languages
– entry of new members in May 2004: more to come...
• Europarl corpus
– collected 20-30 million words per language
→ 110 language pairs
• 110 Translation systems
– 3 weeks on 16-node cluster computer
→ 110 translation systems
• Basis of a new European Commission funded project

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Quality of Translation Systems

• Scores for all 110 systems
da de el en es fr fi it nl pt sv
da - 18.4 21.1 28.5 26.4 28.7 14.2 22.2 21.4 24.3 28.3
de 22.3 - 20.7 25.3 25.4 27.7 11.8 21.3 23.4 23.2 20.5
el 22.7 17.4 - 27.2 31.2 32.1 11.4 26.8 20.0 27.6 21.2
en 25.2 17.6 23.2 - 30.1 31.1 13.0 25.3 21.0 27.1 24.8
es 24.1 18.2 28.3 30.5 - 40.2 12.5 32.3 21.4 35.9 23.9
fr 23.7 18.5 26.1 30.0 38.4 - 12.6 32.4 21.1 35.3 22.6
fi 20.0 14.5 18.2 21.8 21.1 22.4 - 18.3 17.0 19.1 18.8
it 21.4 16.9 24.8 27.8 34.0 36.0 11.0 - 20.0 31.2 20.2
nl 20.5 18.3 17.4 23.0 22.9 24.6 10.3 20.0 - 20.7 19.0
pt 23.2 18.2 26.4 30.1 37.9 39.0 11.9 32.0 20.2 - 21.9
sv 30.3 18.9 22.8 30.2 28.6 29.7 15.3 23.9 21.9 25.9 -
[from Koehn, 2005: Europarl]

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Clustering Languages
fi
el

de nl
sv da en
pt es fr it
[from Koehn, 2005, MT Summit]

• Clustering languages based on how easy they translate into each other
⇒ Approximation of language families

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Translation examples
• Spanish-English
(1) the current situation , unsustainable above all for many self-employed drivers and in the
area of agriculture , we must improve without doubt .
(2) in itself , it is good to reach an agreement on procedures , but we have to ensure that this
system is not likely to be used as a weapon policy .
• Finnish-English
(1) the current situation , which is unacceptable , in particular , for many carriers and
responsible for agriculture , is in any case , to be improved .
(2) agreement on procedures in itself is a good thing , but there is a need to ensure that the
system cannot be used as a political lyömäaseena .
• English reference
(1) the current situation , which is intolerable , particularly for many independent haulage firms
and for agriculture , does in any case need to be improved .
(2) an agreement on procedures in itself is a good thing , but we must make sure that the
system cannot be used as a political weapon .

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Translate into vs. out of a Language

• Some languages are easier to translate into that out of

Language From Into Diff

da 23.4 23.3 0.0
de 22.2 17.7 -4.5
el 23.8 22.9 -0.9
en 23.8 27.4 +3.6
es 26.7 29.6 +2.9
fr 26.1 31.1 +5.1
fi 19.1 12.4 -6.7
it 24.3 25.4 +1.1
nl 19.7 20.7 +1.1
pt 26.1 27.0 +0.9
sv 24.8 22.1 -2.6
[from Koehn, 2005: Europarl]

• Morphologically rich languages harder to generate (German, Finnish)

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Backtranslations
• Checking translation quality by back-transliteration
• The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak
• English → Russian → English
• The vodka is good but the meat is rotten

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Backtranslations II
• Does not correlate with unidirectional performance

Language From Into Back

da 28.5 25.2 56.6
de 25.3 17.6 48.8
el 27.2 23.2 56.5
es 30.5 30.1 52.6
fi 21.8 13.0 44.4
it 27.8 25.3 49.9
nl 23.0 21.0 46.0
pt 30.1 27.1 53.6
sv 30.2 24.8 54.4
[from Koehn, 2005: Europarl]

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Available Data
• Available parallel text
– Europarl: 30 million words in 11 languages http://www.statmt.org/europarl/
– Acquis Communitaire: 8-50 million words in 20 EU languages
– Canadian Hansards: 20 million words from Ulrich Germann, ISI
– Chinese/Arabic to English: over 100 million words from LDC
– lots more French/English, Spanish/French/English from LDC
• Available monolingual text (for language modeling)
– 2.8 billion words of English from LDC
– 100s of billions, trillions on the web

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More Data, Better Translations

0.30
Swedish

French
0.25

German

0.20

Finnish

0.15

10k 20k 40k 80k 160k 320k

[from Koehn, 2003: Europarl]

• Log-scale improvements on BLEU:
Doubling the training data gives constant improvement (+1 %BLEU)

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More LM Data, Better Translations

BLEU
51.2 51.7 51.9 52.3 53.1
50 48.5 49.1 49.8 50.0 50.5
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
75M 150M 300M 600M 1.2B 2.5B 5B 10B 18B +web
[from Och, 2005: MT Eval presentation]
• Also log-scale improvements on BLEU:
doubling the training data gives constant improvement (+0.5 %BLEU)
(last addition is 218 billion words out-of-domain web data)

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• Decoding
• Statistical Modeling
• EM Algorithm
• Word Alignment
• Phrase-Based Translation
• Discriminative Training
• Syntax-Based Statistical MT

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Decoding Process
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

• Build translation left to right

– select foreign words to be translated

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Decoding Process
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary

• Build translation left to right

– select foreign words to be translated
– find English phrase translation
– add English phrase to end of partial translation

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Decoding Process
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary

• Build translation left to right

– select foreign words to be translated
– find English phrase translation
– add English phrase to end of partial translation
– mark foreign words as translated

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Decoding Process
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary did not

• One to many translation

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Decoding Process
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary did not slap

• Many to one translation

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Decoding Process
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary did not slap the

• Many to one translation

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Decoding Process
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary did not slap the green

• Reordering

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Decoding Process
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary did not slap the green witch

• Translation finished

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Translation Options
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary not give a slap to the witch green

did not a slap by green witch
no slap to the
did not give to
the
slap the witch

• Look up possible phrase translations

– many different ways to segment words into phrases
– many different ways to translate each phrase

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Hypothesis Expansion
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary not give a slap to the witch green

did not a slap by green witch
no slap to the
did not give to
the
slap the witch

e:
f: ---------
p: 1

• Start with empty hypothesis

– e: no English words
– f: no foreign words covered
– p: probability 1

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Hypothesis Expansion
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary not give a slap to the witch green

did not a slap by green witch
no slap to the
did not give to
the
slap the witch

e: e: Mary
f: --------- f: *--------
p: 1 p: .534

• Pick translation option

• Create hypothesis
– e: add English phrase Mary
– f: first foreign word covered
– p: probability 0.534

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A Quick Word on Probabilities

• Not going into detail here, but...
• Translation Model
– phrase translation probability p(Mary|Maria)
– reordering costs
– phrase/word count costs
– ...
• Language Model
– uses trigrams:
– p(Mary did not) =
p(Mary|START) ×p(did|Mary,START) × p(not|Mary did)

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Hypothesis Expansion
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary not give a slap to the witch green

did not a slap by green witch
no slap to the
did not give to
the
slap the witch

e: witch
f: -------*-
p: .182

e: e: Mary
f: --------- f: *--------
p: 1 p: .534

• Add another hypothesis

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Hypothesis Expansion
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary not give a slap to the witch green

did not a slap by green witch
no slap to the
did not give to
the
slap the witch

e: witch e: ... slap

f: -------*- f: *-***----
p: .182 p: .043

e: e: Mary
f: --------- f: *--------
p: 1 p: .534

• Further hypothesis expansion

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Hypothesis Expansion
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary not give a slap to the witch green

did not a slap by green witch
no slap to the
did not give to
the
slap the witch

e: witch e: slap
f: -------*- f: *-***----
p: .182 p: .043

e: e: Mary e: did not e: slap e: the e:green witch

f: --------- f: *-------- f: **------- f: *****---- f: *******-- f: *********
p: 1 p: .534 p: .154 p: .015 p: .004283 p: .000271

• ... until all foreign words covered

– find best hypothesis that covers all foreign words
– backtrack to read off translation

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Hypothesis Expansion
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary not give a slap to the witch green

did not a slap by green witch
no slap to the
did not give to
the
slap the witch

e: witch e: slap
f: -------*- f: *-***----
p: .182 p: .043

e: e: Mary e: did not e: slap e: the e:green witch

f: --------- f: *-------- f: **------- f: *****---- f: *******-- f: *********
p: 1 p: .534 p: .154 p: .015 p: .004283 p: .000271

• Adding more hypothesis

⇒ Explosion of search space

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Explosion of Search Space

• Number of hypotheses is exponential with respect to sentence length
⇒ Decoding is NP-complete [Knight, 1999]
⇒ Need to reduce search space
– risk free: hypothesis recombination
– risky: histogram/threshold pruning

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Hypothesis Recombination
p=0.092

p=1 p=0.534 p=0.092

Mary did not give

did not
give
p=0.164 p=0.044

• Different paths to the same partial translation

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Hypothesis Recombination
p=0.092

p=1 p=0.534 p=0.092

Mary did not give

did not
give
p=0.164

• Different paths to the same partial translation

⇒ Combine paths
– drop weaker path
– keep pointer from weaker path

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Hypothesis Recombination
p=0.092 p=0.017
did not give
Joe
p=1 p=0.534 p=0.092
Mary did not give

did not
give
p=0.164

• Recombined hypotheses do not have to match completely

• No matter what is added, weaker path can be dropped, if:
– last two English words match (matters for language model)
– foreign word coverage vectors match (effects future path)

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Hypothesis Recombination
p=0.092
did not give
Joe
p=1 p=0.534 p=0.092
Mary did not give

did not
give
p=0.164

• Recombined hypotheses do not have to match completely

• No matter what is added, weaker path can be dropped, if:
– last two English words match (matters for language model)
– foreign word coverage vectors match (effects future path)
⇒ Combine paths

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Pruning
• Hypothesis recombination is not sufficient
⇒ Heuristically discard weak hypotheses early
• Organize Hypothesis in stacks, e.g. by
– same foreign words covered
– same number of foreign words covered (Pharaoh does this)
– same number of English words produced
• Compare hypotheses in stacks, discard bad ones
– histogram pruning: keep top n hypotheses in each stack (e.g., n=100)
– threshold pruning: keep hypotheses that are at most α times the cost of
best hypothesis in stack (e.g., α = 0.001)

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Hypothesis Stacks

1 2 3 4 5 6

• Organization of hypothesis into stacks

– here: based on number of foreign words translated
– during translation all hypotheses from one stack are expanded
– expanded Hypotheses are placed into stacks

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Comparing Hypotheses
• Comparing hypotheses with same number of foreign words covered
Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

e: Mary did not e: the

f: **------- f: -----**--
p: 0.154 p: 0.354
better covers
partial easier part
translation --> lower cost

• Hypothesis that covers easy part of sentence is preferred

⇒ Need to consider future cost of uncovered parts

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Future Cost Estimation

a la

to the

• Estimate cost to translate remaining part of input

• Step 1: estimate future cost for each translation option
– look up translation model cost
– estimate language model cost (no prior context)
– ignore reordering model cost
→ LM * TM = p(to) * p(the|to) * p(to the|a la)

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Future Cost Estimation: Step 2

a la

to the cost = 0.0372

to cost = 0.0299

the cost = 0.0354

• Step 2: find cheapest cost among translation options

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Future Cost Estimation: Step 3

Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

• Step 3: find cheapest future cost path for each span

– can be done efficiently by dynamic programming
– future cost for every span can be pre-computed

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Future Cost Estimation: Application

Maria no dio una bofetada a la bruja verde

Mary 0.1 slap 0.006672

future covered future
covered cost cost
*

e: e: Mary e: ... slap

f: --------- f: *-------- f: *-***----
p: 1 p: .534 p: .043
fc: .0006672
p*fc:.000029

• Use future cost estimates when pruning hypotheses

• For each uncovered contiguous span:
– look up future costs for each maximal contiguous uncovered span
– add to actually accumulated cost for translation option for pruning

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Pharaoh
• A beam search decoder for phrase-based models
– works with various phrase-based models
– beam search algorithm
– time complexity roughly linear with input length
– good quality takes about 1 second per sentence
• Very good performance in DARPA/NIST Evaluation
• Freely available for researchers http://www.isi.edu/licensed-sw/pharaoh/

• Coming soon: open source version of Pharaoh

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Running the decoder

• An example run of the decoder:
% echo ’das ist ein kleines haus’ | pharaoh -f pharaoh.ini > out
Pharaoh v1.2.9, written by Philipp Koehn
a beam search decoder for phrase-based statistical machine translation models
(c) 2002-2003 University of Southern California
(c) 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(c) 2005 University of Edinburgh, Scotland
loading language model from europarl.srilm
loading phrase translation table from phrase-table, stored 21, pruned 0, kept 21
loaded data structures in 2 seconds
reading input sentences
translating 1 sentences.translated 1 sentences in 0 seconds
[3mm] % cat out
this is a small house

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Phrase Translation Table

• Core model component is the phrase translation table:
der ||| the ||| 0.3
das ||| the ||| 0.4
das ||| it ||| 0.1
das ||| this ||| 0.1
die ||| the ||| 0.3
ist ||| is ||| 1.0
ist ||| ’s ||| 1.0
das ist ||| it is ||| 0.2
das ist ||| this is ||| 0.8
es ist ||| it is ||| 0.8
es ist ||| this is ||| 0.2
ein ||| a ||| 1.0
ein ||| an ||| 1.0
klein ||| small ||| 0.8
klein ||| little ||| 0.8
kleines ||| small ||| 0.2
kleines ||| little ||| 0.2
haus ||| house ||| 1.0
alt ||| old ||| 0.8
altes ||| old ||| 0.2
gibt ||| gives ||| 1.0
es gibt ||| there is ||| 1.0

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Trace
• Running the decoder with switch “-t”
% echo ’das ist ein kleines haus’ | pharaoh -f pharaoh.ini -t
[...]
this is |0.014086|0|1| a |0.188447|2|2| small |0.000706353|3|3|
house |1.46468e-07|4|4|

• Trace for each applied phrase translation:

– output phrase (there is)
– cost incurred by this phrase (0.014086)
– coverage of foreign words (0-1)

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Reordering Example
• Sometimes phrases have to be reordered:
% echo ’ein kleines haus ist das’ | pharaoh -f pharaoh.ini -t -d 0.5
[...]
this |0.000632805|4|4| is |0.13853|3|3| a |0.0255035|0|0|
small |0.000706353|1|1| house |1.46468e-07|2|2|

• First output phrase this is translation of the 4th word

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Hypothesis Accounting
• The switch “-v” allows for detailed run time information:
% echo ’das ist ein kleins haus’ | pharaoh -f pharaoh.ini -v 2
[...]
HYP: 114 added, 284 discarded below threshold, 0 pruned, 58 merged.
BEST: this is a small house -28.9234

• Statistics over how many hypothesis were generated

– 114 hypotheses were added to hypothesis stacks
– 284 hypotheses were discarded because they were too bad
– 0 hypotheses were pruned, because a stack got too big
– 58 hypotheses were merged due to recombination
• Probability of the best translation: exp(-28.9234)

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Translation Options
• Even more run time information is revealed with “-v 3”:
[das;2]
the<1>, pC=-0.916291, c=-5.78855
it<2>, pC=-2.30259, c=-8.0761
this<3>, pC=-2.30259, c=-8.00205
[ist;4]
is<4>, pC=0, c=-4.92223
’s<5>, pC=0, c=-6.11591
[ein;7]
a<8>, pC=0, c=-5.5151
an<9>, pC=0, c=-6.41298
[kleines;9]
small<10>, pC=-1.60944, c=-9.72116
little<11>, pC=-1.60944, c=-10.0953
[haus;10]
house<12>, pC=0, c=-9.26607
[das ist;5]
it is<6>, pC=-1.60944, c=-10.207
this is<7>, pC=-0.223144, c=-10.2906

• Translation model cost (pC) and future cost estimates (c)

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Future Cost Estimation

• Pre-computation of the future cost estimates:
future costs from 0 to 0 is -5.78855
future costs from 0 to 1 is -10.207
future costs from 0 to 2 is -15.7221
future costs from 0 to 3 is -25.4433
future costs from 0 to 4 is -34.7094
future costs from 1 to 1 is -4.92223
future costs from 1 to 2 is -10.4373
future costs from 1 to 3 is -20.1585
future costs from 1 to 4 is -29.4246
future costs from 2 to 2 is -5.5151
future costs from 2 to 3 is -15.2363
future costs from 2 to 4 is -24.5023
future costs from 3 to 3 is -9.72116
future costs from 3 to 4 is -18.9872
future costs from 4 to 4 is -9.26607

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Hypothesis Expansion
• Start of beam search: First hypothesis (das → the)
creating hypothesis 1 from 0 ( ... </s> <s> )
base score 0
covering 0-0: das
translated as: the => translation cost -0.916291
distance 0 => distortion cost 0
language model cost for ’the’ -2.03434
word penalty -0
score -2.95064 + futureCost -29.4246 = -32.3752
new best estimate for this stack
merged hypothesis on stack 1, now size 1

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Hypothesis Expansion
• Another hypothesis (das ist → this is)
creating hypothesis 12 from 0 ( ... </s> <s> )
base score 0
covering 0-1: das ist
translated as: this is => translation cost -0.223144
distance 0 => distortion cost 0
language model cost for ’this’ -3.06276
language model cost for ’is’ -0.976669
word penalty -0
score -4.26258 + futureCost -24.5023 = -28.7649
new best estimate for this stack
merged hypothesis on stack 2, now size 2

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Hypothesis Expansion
• Hypothesis recombination
creating hypothesis 27 from 3 ( ... <s> this )
base score -5.36535
covering 1-1: ist
translated as: is => translation cost 0
distance 0 => distortion cost 0
language model cost for ’is’ -0.976669
word penalty -0
score -6.34202 + futureCost -24.5023 = -30.8443
worse than existing path to 12, discarding

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Hypothesis Expansion
• Bad hypothesis that falls out of the beam
creating hypothesis 52 from 6 ( ... <s> a )
base score -6.65992
covering 0-0: das
translated as: this => translation cost -2.30259
distance -3 => distortion cost -3
language model cost for ’this’ -8.69176
word penalty -0
score -20.6543 + futureCost -23.9095 = -44.5637
estimate below threshold, discarding

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Generating Best Translation

• Generating best translation
– find best final hypothesis (442)
– trace back path to initial hypothesis
best hypothesis 442
[ 442 => 343 ]
[ 343 => 106 ]
[ 106 => 12 ]
[ 12 => 0 ]

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Beam Size
• Trade-off between speed and quality via beam size
% echo ’das ist ein kleines haus’ | pharaoh -f pharaoh.ini -s 10 -v 2
[...]
collected 12 translation options
HYP: 78 added, 122 discarded below threshold, 33 pruned, 20 merged.
BEST: this is a small house -28.9234

Beam size Threshold Hyp. added Hyp. discarded Hyp. pruned Hyp. merged
1000 unlimited 634 0 0 1306
100 unlimited 557 32 199 572
100 0.00001 144 284 0 58
10 0.00001 78 122 33 20
1 0.00001 9 19 4 0

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Limits on Reordering
• Reordering may be limited
– Monotone Translation: No reordering at all
– Only phrase movements of at most n words
• Reordering limits speed up search
• Current reordering models are weak, so limits improve translation quality

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Word Lattice Generation

p=0.092
did not give
Joe
p=1 p=0.534 p=0.092
Mary did not give

did not
give
p=0.164

• Search graph can be easily converted into a word lattice

– can be further mined for n-best lists
→ enables reranking approaches
→ enables discriminative training
Joe
did not give
did not give
Mary
did not give

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Sample N-Best List

• N-best list from Pharaoh:
Translation ||| Reordering LM TM WordPenalty ||| Score
this is a small house ||| 0 -27.0908 -1.83258 -5 ||| -28.9234
this is a little house ||| 0 -28.1791 -1.83258 -5 ||| -30.0117
it is a small house ||| 0 -27.108 -3.21888 -5 ||| -30.3268
it is a little house ||| 0 -28.1963 -3.21888 -5 ||| -31.4152
this is an small house ||| 0 -31.7294 -1.83258 -5 ||| -33.562
it is an small house ||| 0 -32.3094 -3.21888 -5 ||| -35.5283
this is an little house ||| 0 -33.7639 -1.83258 -5 ||| -35.5965
this is a house small ||| -3 -31.4851 -1.83258 -5 ||| -36.3176
this is a house little ||| -3 -31.5689 -1.83258 -5 ||| -36.4015
it is an little house ||| 0 -34.3439 -3.21888 -5 ||| -37.5628
it is a house small ||| -3 -31.5022 -3.21888 -5 ||| -37.7211
this is an house small ||| -3 -32.8999 -1.83258 -5 ||| -37.7325
it is a house little ||| -3 -31.586 -3.21888 -5 ||| -37.8049
this is an house little ||| -3 -32.9837 -1.83258 -5 ||| -37.8163
the house is a little ||| -7 -28.5107 -2.52573 -5 ||| -38.0364
the is a small house ||| 0 -35.6899 -2.52573 -5 ||| -38.2156
is it a little house ||| -4 -30.3603 -3.91202 -5 ||| -38.2723
the house is a small ||| -7 -28.7683 -2.52573 -5 ||| -38.294
it ’s a small house ||| 0 -34.8557 -3.91202 -5 ||| -38.7677
this house is a little ||| -7 -28.0443 -3.91202 -5 ||| -38.9563
it ’s a little house ||| 0 -35.1446 -3.91202 -5 ||| -39.0566
this house is a small ||| -7 -28.3018 -3.91202 -5 ||| -39.2139

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XML Markup
Er erzielte <NUMBER english=’17.55’>17,55</NUMBER> Punkte .

• Add additional translation options

– number translation
– noun phrase translation [Koehn, 2003]
– name translation
• Additional options
– provide multiple translations
– provide probability distribution along with translations
– allow bypassing of provided translations

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• Decoding

• Statistical Modeling
• EM Algorithm
• Word Alignment
• Phrase-Based Translation
• Discriminative Training
• Syntax-Based Statistical MT

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Statistical Modeling
Mary did not slap the green witch

Maria no daba una bofetada a la bruja verde

[from Knight and Knight, 2004, SMT Tutorial]

• Learn P (f |e) from a parallel corpus
• Not sufficient data to estimate P (f |e) directly

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Statistical Modeling (2)

Mary did not slap the green witch

Maria no daba una bofetada a la bruja verde

• Decompose the process into smaller steps

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Statistical Modeling (3)

Mary did not slap the green witch
n(3|slap)
Mary not slap slap slap the green witch
p-null
Mary not slap slap slap NULL the green witch
t(la|the)
Maria no daba una botefada a la verde bruja
d(4|4)
Maria no daba una bofetada a la bruja verde

• Probabilities for smaller steps can be learned

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Statistical Modeling (4)

• Generate a story how an English string e gets to be a foreign string f
– choices in story are decided by reference to parameters
– e.g., p(bruja|witch)
• Formula for P (f |e) in terms of parameters
– usually long and hairy, but mechanical to extract from the story
• Training to obtain parameter estimates from possibly incomplete data
– off-the-shelf Expectation Maximization (EM)

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Parallel Corpora
... la maison ... la maison blue ... la fleur ...

... the house ... the blue house ... the flower ...

[from Knight and Knight, 2004, SMT Tutorial]

• Incomplete data
– English and foreign words, but no connections between them
• Chicken and egg problem
– if we had the connections,
we could estimate the parameters of our generative story
– if we had the parameters,
we could estimate the connections in the data

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• Decoding
• Statistical Modeling

• EM Algorithm
• Word Alignment
• Phrase-Based Translation
• Discriminative Training
• Syntax-Based Statistical MT

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EM Algorithm
• Incomplete data
– if we had complete data, would could estimate model
– if we had model, we could fill in the gaps in the data
• EM in a nutshell
1. initialize model parameters (e.g. uniform)
2. assign probabilities to the missing data (the connections)
3. estimate model parameters from completed data
4. iterate steps 2 and 3

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EM Algorithm (2)
... la maison ... la maison blue ... la fleur ...

... the house ... the blue house ... the flower ...

• Initial step: all connections equally likely

• Model learns that, e.g., la is often connected with the

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EM Algorithm (3)
... la maison ... la maison blue ... la fleur ...

... the house ... the blue house ... the flower ...

• After one iteration

• Connections, e.g., between la and the are more likely

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EM Algorithm (4)
... la maison ... la maison bleu ... la fleur ...

... the house ... the blue house ... the flower ...

• After another iteration

• It becomes apparent that connections, e.g., between fleur and flower are more
likely (pigeon hole principle)

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EM Algorithm (5)
... la maison ... la maison bleu ... la fleur ...

... the house ... the blue house ... the flower ...

• Convergence
• Inherent hidden structure revealed by EM

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EM Algorithm (6)
... la maison ... la maison bleu ... la fleur ...

... the house ... the blue house ... the flower ...

p(la|the) = 0.453
p(le|the) = 0.334
p(maison|house) = 0.876
p(bleu|blue) = 0.563
...

• Parameter estimation from the connected corpus

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Flaws of Word-Based MT
• Multiple English words for one German word

one-to-many problem: Zeitmangel → lack of time

German: Zeitmangel erschwert das Problem .
Gloss: lack of time makes more difficult the problem .
Correct translation: Lack of time makes the problem more difficult.
MT output: Time makes the problem .

• Phrasal translation

non-compositional phrase: erübrigt sich → there is no point in

German: Eine Diskussion erübrigt sich demnach .
Gloss: a discussion is made unnecessary itself therefore .
Correct translation: Therefore, there is no point in a discussion.
MT output: A debate turned therefore .

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Flaws of Word-Based MT (2)

• Syntactic transformations

reordering, genitive NP: der Sache → for this matter

German: Das ist der Sache nicht angemessen .
Gloss: that is the matter not appropriate .
Correct translation: That is not appropriate for this matter .
MT output: That is the thing is not appropriate .

object/subject reordering
German: Den Vorschlag lehnt die Kommission ab .
Gloss: the proposal rejects the commission off .
Correct translation: The commission rejects the proposal .
MT output: The proposal rejects the commission .

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• Decoding
• Statistical Modeling
• EM Algorithm

• Word Alignment
• Phrase-Based Translation
• Discriminative Training
• Syntax-Based Statistical MT

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Word Alignment
• Notion of word alignment valuable
• Shared task at NAACL 2003 and ACL 2005 workshops
bofetada bruja
Maria no daba una a la verde

Mary

did

not

slap

the

green

witch

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Word Alignment with IBM Models

• IBM Models create a many-to-one mapping
– words are aligned using an alignment function
– a function may return the same value for different input
(one-to-many mapping)
– a function can not return multiple values for one input
(no many-to-one mapping)
• But we need many-to-many mappings

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Improved Word Alignments

english to spanish spanish to english
bofetada bruja bofetada bruja
Maria no daba una a la verde Maria no daba una a la verde

Mary Mary

did did

not not

slap slap

the the

green green

witch witch

intersection
bofetada bruja
Maria no daba una a la verde

Mary

did

not

slap

the

green

witch

• Intersection of GIZA++ bidirectional alignments

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Improved Word Alignments (2)

bofetada bruja
Maria no daba una a la verde

Mary

did

not

slap

the

green

witch

• Grow additional alignment points [Och and Ney, CompLing2003]

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Growing Heuristic
GROW-DIAG-FINAL(e2f,f2e):
neighboring = ((-1,0),(0,-1),(1,0),(0,1),(-1,-1),(-1,1),(1,-1),(1,1))
alignment = intersect(e2f,f2e);
GROW-DIAG(); FINAL(e2f); FINAL(f2e);

GROW-DIAG():
iterate until no new points added
for english word e = 0 ... en
for foreign word f = 0 ... fn
if ( e aligned with f )
for each neighboring point ( e-new, f-new ):
if ( ( e-new not aligned and f-new not aligned ) and
( e-new, f-new ) in union( e2f, f2e ) )
add alignment point ( e-new, f-new )
FINAL(a):
for english word e-new = 0 ... en
for foreign word f-new = 0 ... fn
if ( ( e-new not aligned or f-new not aligned ) and
( e-new, f-new ) in alignment a )
add alignment point ( e-new, f-new )

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• Decoding
• Statistical Modeling
• EM Algorithm
• Word Alignment

• Phrase-Based Translation
• Discriminative Training
• Syntax-Based Statistical MT

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Phrase-Based Translation
Morgen fliege ich nach Kanada zur Konferenz

Tomorrow I will fly to the conference in Canada

• Foreign input is segmented in phrases

– any sequence of words, not necessarily linguistically motivated
• Each phrase is translated into English
• Phrases are reordered
• See [Koehn et al., NAACL2003] as introduction

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Advantages of Phrase-Based Translation

• Many-to-many translation can handle non-compositional phrases
• Use of local context in translation
• The more data, the longer phrases can be learned

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Phrase-Based Systems
• A number of research groups developed phrase-based systems
– RWTH Aachen – Univ. of Southern California/ISI – CMU
– IBM – Johns Hopkins U. – Cambridge U. – U. of Catalunya
– ITC-irst – Edinburgh U. – U. of Maryland – U. Valencia
• Systems differ in
– training methods
– model for phrase translation table
– reordering models
– additional feature functions
• Currently best method for SMT (MT?)
– top systems in DARPA/NIST evaluation are phrase-based
– best commercial system for Arabic-English is phrase-based

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Phrase Translation Table

• Phrase Translations for den Vorschlag

English φ(e|f) English φ(e|f)

the proposal 0.6227 the suggestions 0.0114
’s proposal 0.1068 the proposed 0.0114
a proposal 0.0341 the motion 0.0091
the idea 0.0250 the idea of 0.0091
this proposal 0.0227 the proposal , 0.0068
proposal 0.0205 its proposal 0.0068
of the proposal 0.0159 it 0.0068
the proposals 0.0159 ... ...

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How to Learn the Phrase Translation Table?

• Start with the word alignment:
bofetada bruja
Maria no daba una a la verde

Mary

did

not

slap

the

green

witch

• Collect all phrase pairs that are consistent with the word alignment

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Consistent with Word Alignment

Maria no daba Maria no daba Maria no daba

Mary Mary Mary

did did did

not not not

X
slap slap slap
X
consistent inconsistent inconsistent

• Consistent with the word alignment :=

phrase alignment has to contain all alignment points for all covered words

(e, f ) ∈ BP ⇔ ∀ei ∈ e : (ei, fj ) ∈ A → fj ∈ f

and ∀fj ∈ f : (ei, fj ) ∈ A → ei ∈ e

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Word Alignment Induced Phrases

bofetada bruja
Maria no daba una a la verde

Mary

did

not

slap

the

green

witch

(Maria, Mary), (no, did not), (slap, daba una bofetada), (a la, the), (bruja, witch), (verde, green)

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Word Alignment Induced Phrases (2)

bofetada bruja
Maria no daba una a la verde

Mary

did

not

slap

the

green

witch

(Maria, Mary), (no, did not), (slap, daba una bofetada), (a la, the), (bruja, witch), (verde, green),
(Maria no, Mary did not), (no daba una bofetada, did not slap), (daba una bofetada a la, slap the),
(bruja verde, green witch)

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Word Alignment Induced Phrases (3)

bofetada bruja
Maria no daba una a la verde

Mary

did

not

slap

the

green

witch

(Maria, Mary), (no, did not), (slap, daba una bofetada), (a la, the), (bruja, witch), (verde, green),
(Maria no, Mary did not), (no daba una bofetada, did not slap), (daba una bofetada a la, slap the),
(bruja verde, green witch), (Maria no daba una bofetada, Mary did not slap),
(no daba una bofetada a la, did not slap the), (a la bruja verde, the green witch)

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Word Alignment Induced Phrases (4)

bofetada bruja
Maria no daba una a la verde

Mary

did

not

slap

the

green

witch

(Maria, Mary), (no, did not), (slap, daba una bofetada), (a la, the), (bruja, witch), (verde, green),
(Maria no, Mary did not), (no daba una bofetada, did not slap), (daba una bofetada a la, slap the),
(bruja verde, green witch), (Maria no daba una bofetada, Mary did not slap),
(no daba una bofetada a la, did not slap the), (a la bruja verde, the green witch),
(Maria no daba una bofetada a la, Mary did not slap the),
(daba una bofetada a la bruja verde, slap the green witch)

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Word Alignment Induced Phrases (5)

bofetada bruja
Maria no daba una a la verde

Mary

did

not

slap

the

green

witch

(Maria, Mary), (no, did not), (slap, daba una bofetada), (a la, the), (bruja, witch), (verde, green),
(Maria no, Mary did not), (no daba una bofetada, did not slap), (daba una bofetada a la, slap the),
(bruja verde, green witch), (Maria no daba una bofetada, Mary did not slap),
(no daba una bofetada a la, did not slap the), (a la bruja verde, the green witch),
(Maria no daba una bofetada a la, Mary did not slap the), (daba una bofetada a la bruja verde,
slap the green witch), (no daba una bofetada a la bruja verde, did not slap the green witch),
(Maria no daba una bofetada a la bruja verde, Mary did not slap the green witch)

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Probability Distribution of Phrase Pairs

• We need a probability distribution φ(f |e) over the collected phrase pairs
⇒ Possible choices
– relative frequency of collected phrases: φ(f |e) = count(f ,e)
count(f ,e)
P
f
– or, conversely φ(e|f )
– use lexical translation probabilities

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Reordering
• Monotone translation
– do not allow any reordering
→ worse translations
• Limiting reordering (to movement over max. number of words) helps
• Distance-based reordering cost
– moving a foreign phrase over n words: cost ω n
• Lexicalized reordering model

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Lexicalized Reodering Models

f1 f2 f3 f4 f5 f6 f7
m
e1
m
e2

e3
d
e4
s
e5
d
e6

[from Koehn et al., 2005, IWSLT]

• Three orientation types: monotone, swap, discontinuous
• Probability p(swap|e, f ) depends on foreign (and English) phrase involved

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Training

? ?

[from Koehn et al., 2005, IWSLT]

• Orientation type is learned during phrase extractions
• Alignment point to the top left (monotone) or top right (swap)?
• For more, see [Tillmann, 2003] or [Koehn et al., 2005]

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• Decoding
• Statistical Modeling
• EM Algorithm
• Word Alignment
• Phrase-Based Translation

• Discriminative Training
• Syntax-Based Statistical MT

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Log-Linear Models
• IBM Models provided mathematical justification for factoring components
together
pLM × pT M × pD
• These may be weighted
λLM λ λ
pLM × pTTMM × pDD
• Many components pi with weights λi
⇒ i pλi i = exp( i λilog(pi))
Q P

⇒ log i pλi i = i λilog(pi)

Q P

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Knowledge Sources
• Many different knowledge sources useful
– language model
– reordering (distortion) model
– phrase translation model
– word translation model
– word count
– phrase count
– drop word feature
– phrase pair frequency
– additional language models
– additional features

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Set Feature Weights

• Contribution of components pi determined by weight λi
• Methods
– manual setting of weights: try a few, take best
– automate this process
• Learn weights
– set aside a development corpus
– set the weights, so that optimal translation performance on this
development corpus is achieved
– requires automatic scoring method (e.g., BLEU)

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Learn Feature Weights

Model
change
generate feature weights
n-best list

1 3
2 6
3 5
4 2
5 4
6 1

1 find
score translations 2
feature weights
3
4 that move up
5
6 good translations

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Discriminative vs. Generative Models

• Generative models
– translation process is broken down to steps
– each step is modeled by a probability distribution
– each probability distribution is estimated from the data by maximum
likelihood
• Discriminative models
– model consist of a number of features (e.g. the language model score)
– each feature has a weight, measuring its value for judging a translation as
correct
– feature weights are optimized on development data, so that the system
output matches correct translations as close as possible

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Discriminative Training (2)

• Training set (development set)
– different from original training set
– small (maybe 1000 sentences)
– must be different from test set
• Current model translates this development set
– n-best list of translations (n=100, 10000)
– translations in n-best list can be scored
• Feature weights are adjusted
• N-Best list generation and feature weight adjustment repeated for a number
of iterations

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Learning Task
• Task: find weights, so that feature vector of the correct translations ranked
first
TRANSLATION LM TM WP SER

1 Mary not give slap witch green . -17.2 -5.2 -7 1

2 Mary not slap the witch green . -16.3 -5.7 -7 1
3 Mary not give slap of the green witch . -18.1 -4.9 -9 1
4 Mary not give of green witch . -16.5 -5.1 -8 1
5 Mary did not slap the witch green . -20.1 -4.7 -8 1
6 Mary did not slap green witch . -15.5 -3.2 -7 1
7 Mary not slap of the witch green . -19.2 -5.3 -8 1
8 Mary did not give slap of witch green . -23.2 -5.0 -9 1
9 Mary did not give slap of the green witch . -21.8 -4.4 -10 1
10 Mary did slap the witch green . -15.5 -6.9 -7 1
11 Mary did not slap the green witch . -17.4 -5.3 -8 0
12 Mary did slap witch green . -16.9 -6.9 -6 1
13 Mary did slap the green witch . -14.3 -7.1 -7 1
14 Mary did not slap the of green witch . -24.2 -5.3 -9 1
15 Mary did not give slap the witch green . -25.2 -5.5 -9 1

rank translation feature vector

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Methods to Adjust Feature Weights

• Maximum entropy [Och and Ney, ACL2002]
– match expectation of feature values of model and data
• Minimum error rate training [Och, ACL2003]
– try to rank best translations first in n-best list
– can be adapted for various error metrics, even BLEU
• Ordinal regression [Shen et al., NAACL2004]
– separate k worst from the k best translations

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Discriminative Training: Outlook

• Many more features
• Discriminative training on entire training set
• Reranking vs. decoding
– reranking: expensive, global features possible
– decoding: integrating features in search reduces search errors
⇒ First decoding, then reranking

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• Decoding
• Statistical Modeling
• EM Algorithm
• Word Alignment
• Phrase-Based Translation
• Discriminative Training

• Syntax-Based Statistical MT

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Syntax-based SMT
• Why Syntax?
• Yamada and Knight: translating into trees
• Wu: tree-based transfer
• Chiang: hierarchical transfer
• Collins, Kucerova, and Koehn: clause structure
• Koehn: factored translation models
• Other approaches

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The Challenge of Syntax

interlingua

foreign english
semantics semantics

foreign english
syntax syntax

foreign english
words words

• The classical machine translation pyramid

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Advantages of Syntax-Based Translation

• Reordering for syntactic reasons
– e.g., move German object to end of sentence
• Better explanation for function words
– e.g., prepositions, determiners
• Conditioning to syntactically related words
– translation of verb may depend on subject or object
• Use of syntactic language models
– ensuring grammatical output

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Syntactic Language Model

• Good syntax tree → good English
• Allows for long distance constraints

S ?

NP S
VP VP
NP PP NP VP

the house of the man is small the house is the man is small

• Left translation preferred by syntactic LM

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String to Tree Translation

interlingua

foreign english
semantics semantics

foreign english
syntax syntax

foreign english
words words

• Use of English syntax trees [Yamada and Knight, 2001]

– exploit rich resources on the English side
– obtained with statistical parser [Collins, 1997]
– flattened tree to allow more reorderings
– works well with syntactic language model

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Yamada and Knight [2001]

VB VB

PRP VB1 VB2

reorder PRP VB2 VB1

he adores VB TO he TO VB adores

listening TO MN MN TO listening

to music music to

VB VB
insert
PRP VB2 VB1 PRP VB2 VB1

he ha TO VB ga adores desu kare ha TO VB ga daisuki desu

MN TO listening no MN TO kiku no
translate
music to ongaku wo

take leaves
Kare ha ongaku wo kiku no ga daisuki desu
[from Yamada and Knight, 2001]

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Reordering Table
Original Order Reordering p(reorder|original)
PRP VB1 VB2 PRP VB1 VB2 0.074
PRP VB1 VB2 PRP VB2 VB1 0.723
PRP VB1 VB2 VB1 PRP VB2 0.061
PRP VB1 VB2 VB1 VB2 PRP 0.037
PRP VB1 VB2 VB2 PRP VB1 0.083
PRP VB1 VB2 VB2 VB1 PRP 0.021
VB TO VB TO 0.107
VB TO TO VB 0.893
TO NN TO NN 0.251
TO NN NN TO 0.749

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Decoding as Parsing
• Chart Parsing

PRP
he
kare ha ongaku wo kiku no ga daisuki desu

• Pick Japanese words

• Translate into tree stumps

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Decoding as Parsing
• Chart Parsing

PRP NN TO
he music to
kare ha ongaku wo kiku no ga daisuki desu

• Pick Japanese words

• Translate into tree stumps

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Decoding as Parsing
PP

PRP NN TO
he music to
kare ha ongaku wo kiku no ga daisuki desu

• Adding some more entries...

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Decoding as Parsing
PP

PRP NN TO VB
he music to listening
kare ha ongaku wo kiku no ga daisuki desu

• Combine entries

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Decoding as Parsing
VB2

PP

PRP NN TO VB
he music to listening
kare ha ongaku wo kiku no ga daisuki desu

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Decoding as Parsing
VB2

PP

PRP NN TO VB VB1
he music to listening adores
kare ha ongaku wo kiku no ga daisuki desu

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Decoding as Parsing
VB

VB2

PP

PRP NN TO VB VB1
he music to listening adores
kare ha ongaku wo kiku no ga daisuki desu

• Finished when all foreign words covered

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Yamada and Knight: Training

• Parsing of the English side
– using Collins statistical parser
• EM training
– translation model is used to map training sentence pairs
– EM training finds low-perplexity model
→ unity of training and decoding as in IBM models

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Is the Model Realistic?

• Do English trees match foreign strings?
• Crossings between French-English [Fox, 2002]
– 0.29-6.27 per sentence, depending on how it is measured
• Can be reduced by
– flattening tree, as done by [Yamada and Knight, 2001]
– detecting phrasal translation
– special treatment for small number of constructions
• Most coherence between dependency structures

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Inversion Transduction Grammars

• Generation of both English and foreign trees [Wu, 1997]
• Rules (binary and unary)
– A → A1A2kA1A2
– A → A1A2kA2A1
– A → ekf
– A → ek∗
– A → ∗kf
⇒ Common binary tree required
– limits the complexity of reorderings

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Syntax Trees

Mary did not slap the green witch

• English binary tree

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Syntax Trees (2)

Maria no daba una bofetada a la bruja verde

• Spanish binary tree

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Syntax Trees (3)

Mary did not slap * * * the green witch

Maria * no daba una bofetada a la verde bruja

• Combined tree with reordering of Spanish

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Inversion Transduction Grammars

• Decoding by parsing (as before)
• Variations
– may use real syntax on either side or both
– may use multi-word units at leaf nodes

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Chiang: Hierarchical Phrase Model

• Chiang [ACL, 2005] (best paper award!)
– context free bi-grammar
– one non-terminal symbol
– right hand side of rule may include non-terminals and terminals
• Competitive with phrase-based models in 2005 DARPA/NIST evaluation

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Types of Rules
• Word translation
– X → maison k house
• Phrasal translation
– X → daba una bofetada | slap
• Mixed non-terminal / terminal
– X → X bleue k blue X
– X → ne X pas k not X
– X → X1 X2 k X2 of X1
• Technical rules
– S→SXkSX
– S→XkX

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Learning Hierarchical Rules

botefada bruja
Maria no daba una a la verde

Mary

did

not

slap

the

green

witch

X → X verde k green X

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Learning Hierarchical Rules

botefada bruja
Maria no daba una a la verde

Mary

did

not

slap

the

green

witch

X → a la X k the X

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Details of Chiang’s Model

• Too many rules
→ filtering of rules necessary
• Efficient parse decoding possible
– hypothesis stack for each span of foreign words
– only one non-terminal → hypotheses comparable
– length limit for spans that do not start at beginning

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Clause Level Restructuring [Collins et al.]

• Why clause structure?
– languages differ vastly in their clause structure
(English: SVO, Arabic: VSO, German: fairly free order;
a lot details differ: position of adverbs, sub clauses, etc.)
– large-scale restructuring is a problem for phrase models
• Restructuring
– reordering of constituents (main focus)
– add/drop/change of function words
• Details see [Collins, Kucerova and Koehn, ACL 2005]

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Clause Structure
S PPER-SB Ich I
VAFIN-HD werde will
VP-OC PPER-DA Ihnen you
NP-OA ART-OA die the MAIN
ADJ-NK entsprechenden corresponding CLAUSE
NN-NK Anmerkungen comments
VVFIN aushaendigen pass on
$, , ,
S-MO KOUS-CP damit so that
PPER-SB Sie you
VP-OC PDS-OA das that
ADJD-MO eventuell perhaps SUB-
PP-MO APRD-MO bei in ORDINATE
ART-DA der the CLAUSE
NN-NK Abstimmung vote
VVINF uebernehmen include
VMFIN koennen can
$. . .

• Syntax tree from German parser

– statistical parser by Amit Dubay, trained on TIGER treebank

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Reordering When Translating

S PPER-SB Ich I
VAFIN-HD werde will
PPER-DA Ihnen you
NP-OA ART-OA die the
ADJ-NK entsprechenden corresponding
NN-NK Anmerkungen comments
VVFIN aushaendigen pass on
$, , ,
S-MO KOUS-CP damit so that
PPER-SB Sie you
PDS-OA das that
ADJD-MO eventuell perhaps
PP-MO APRD-MO bei in
ART-DA der the
NN-NK Abstimmung vote
VVINF uebernehmen include
VMFIN koennen can
$. . .

• Reordering when translating into English

– tree is flattened
– clause level constituents line up

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Clause Level Reordering

S PPER-SB Ich 1 I
VAFIN-HD werde 2 will
PPER-DA Ihnen 4 you
NP-OA ART-OA die the
ADJ-NK entsprechenden 5 corresponding
NN-NK Anmerkungen comments
VVFIN aushaendigen 3 pass on
$, , ,
S-MO KOUS-CP damit 1 so that
PPER-SB Sie 2 you
PDS-OA das 6 that
ADJD-MO eventuell 4 perhaps
PP-MO APRD-MO bei in
ART-DA der 7 the
NN-NK Abstimmung vote
VVINF uebernehmen 5 include
VMFIN koennen 3 can
$. . .

• Clause level reordering is awell defined task

– label German constituents with their English order
– done this for 300 sentences, two annotators, high agreement

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Systematic Reordering German → English

• Many types of reorderings are systematic
– move verb group together
– subject - verb - object
– move negation in front of verb
⇒ Write rules by hand
– apply rules to test and training data
– train standard phrase-based SMT system

System BLEU
baseline system 25.2%
with manual rules 26.8%

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Improved Translations
• we must also this criticism should be taken seriously .
→ we must also take this criticism seriously .

• i am with him that it is necessary , the institutional balance by means of a political revaluation
of both the commission and the council to maintain .
→ i agree with him in this , that it is necessary to maintain the institutional balance by means of
a political revaluation of both the commission and the council .

• thirdly , we believe that the principle of differentiation of negotiations note .

→ thirdly , we maintain the principle of differentiation of negotiations .

• perhaps it would be a constructive dialog between the government and opposition parties ,
social representative a positive impetus in the right direction .
→ perhaps a constructive dialog between government and opposition parties and social
representative could give a positive impetus in the right direction .

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Factored Translation Models

• Factored represention of words

surface surface
stem stem
part-of-speech
morphology
⇒ part-of-speech
morphology
word class word class
... ...

• Goals
– Generalization, e.g. by translating stems, not surface forms
– Additional information within model (using syntax for reordering, language
modeling)

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Decomposing Translation: Example

• Translating stem and syntactic information separately
stem ⇒ stem

part-of-speech part-of-speech
morphology ⇒ morphology
• Generate surface form on target side

surface
⇑
stem
part-of-speech
morphology

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Factored Models: Open Questions

• What is the best decomposition into translation and generation steps?
• What information is useful?
– translation: mostly lexical, or stems for richer statistics
– reordering: syntactic information useful
– language model: syntactic information for overall grammatical coherence
• Use of annotation tools
• Use of automatically discovered generalizations (word classes)
• Back-off models (use complex mappings, if available)

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Other Syntax-Based Approaches

• ISI: extending work of Yamada/Knight
– more complex rules
– performance approaching phrase-based
• Prague: Translation via dependency structures
– parallel Czech–English dependency treebank
– tecto-grammatical translation model [EACL 2003]
• U.Alberta/Microsoft: treelet translation
– translating from English into foreign languages
– using dependency parser in English
– project dependency tree into foreign language for training
– map parts of the dependency tree (“treelets”) into foreign languages

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Other Syntax-Based Approaches (2)

• Reranking phrase-based SMT output with syntactic features
– create n-best list with phrase-based system
– POS tag and parse candidate translations
– rerank with syntactic features
– see [Koehn, 2003] and JHU Workshop [Och et al., 2003]
• JHU Summer workshop 2005
– Genpar: tool for syntax-based SMT

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Syntax: Does it help?

• Not yet
– best systems still phrase-based, treat words as tokens
• Well, maybe...
– work on reordering German
– automatically trained tree transfer systems promising
• Why not yet?
– if real syntax, we need good parsers — are they good enough?
– syntactic annotations add a level of complexity
→ difficult to handle, slow to train and decode
– few researchers good at statistical modeling and understand syntactic
theories

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