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LOCATING AND REDUCING TRANSLATIONDIFFICULTY

Mohit, Behrang (2010) LOCATING AND REDUCING TRANSLATIONDIFFICULTY. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

The challenge of translation varies from one sentence to another, or even between phrases of a sentence. We investigate whether variations in difficulty can be located automatically for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). Furthermore, we hypothesize that customization of a SMT system based on difficulty information, improves the translation quality.We assume a binary categorization for phrases: easy vs. difficult. Our focus is on the Difficult to Translate Phrases (DTPs). Our experiments show that for a sentence, improving the translation of the DTP improves the translation of the surrounding non-difficult phrases too. To locate the most difficult phrase of each sentence, we use machine learning and construct a difficulty classifier. To improve the translation of DTPs, we introduce customization methods for three components of the SMT system: I. language model; II. translation model; III. decoding weights. With each method, we construct a new component that is dedicated for the translation of difficult phrases. Our experiments on Arabic-to-English translation show that DTP-specific system customization is mostly successful.Overall, we demonstrate that translation difficulty is an important source of information for machine translation and can be used to enhance its performance.


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Details

Item Type: University of Pittsburgh ETD
Status: Unpublished
Creators/Authors:
CreatorsEmailPitt UsernameORCID
Mohit, Behrangbehrang@cs.pitt.edu
ETD Committee:
TitleMemberEmail AddressPitt UsernameORCID
Committee ChairHwa, Rebeccahwa@cs.pitt.eduREH23
Committee MemberLavie, Alonalavie@cs.cmu.edu
Committee MemberHe, Daqingdaqing@mail.sis.pitt.eduDAH44
Committee MemberWiebe, Janycewiebe@cs.pitt.eduJMW106
Date: 30 September 2010
Date Type: Completion
Defense Date: 4 December 2009
Approval Date: 30 September 2010
Submission Date: 26 July 2010
Access Restriction: No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately.
Institution: University of Pittsburgh
Schools and Programs: Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Intelligent Systems
Degree: PhD - Doctor of Philosophy
Thesis Type: Doctoral Dissertation
Refereed: Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords: System Customization; Translation Difficulty; Machine Translation; Model Adaptation
Other ID: http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-07262010-165608/, etd-07262010-165608
Date Deposited: 10 Nov 2011 19:54
Last Modified: 15 Nov 2016 13:47
URI: http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/8629

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