NAACL 2015
TechTalks from event: NAACL 2015
8C: Machine Translation
-
A Comparison of Update Strategies for Large-Scale Maximum Expected BLEU TrainingThis work presents a flexible and efficient discriminative training approach for statistical machine translation. We propose to use the RPROP algorithm for optimizing a maximum expected BLEU objective and experimentally compare it to several other updating schemes. It proves to be more efficient and effective than the previously proposed growth transformation technique and also yields better results than stochastic gradient descent and AdaGrad. We also report strong empirical results on two large scale tasks, namely BOLT Chinese->English and WMT German->English, where our final systems outperform results reported by Setiawan and Zhou (2013) and on matrix.statmt.org. On the WMT task, discriminative training is performed on the full training data of 4M sentence pairs, which is unsurpassed in the literature.
-
Gappy Pattern Matching on GPUs for On-Demand Extraction of Hierarchical Translation GrammarsGrammars for machine translation can be materialized on demand by finding source phrases in an indexed parallel corpus and extracting their translations. This approach is limited in practical applications by the computational expense of online lookup and extraction. For phrase-based models, recent work has shown that on-demand grammar extraction can be greatly accelerated by parallelization on general purpose graphics processing units (GPUs), but these algorithms do not work for hierarchical models, which require matching patterns that contain gaps. We address this limitation by presenting a novel GPU algorithm for on-demand hierarchical grammar extraction that is at least an order of magnitude faster than a comparable CPU algorithm when processing large batches of sentences. In terms of end-to-end translation, with decoding on the CPU, we increase throughput by roughly two thirds on a standard MT evaluation dataset. The GPU necessary to achieve these improvements increases the cost of a server by about a third. We believe that GPU-based extraction of hierarchical grammars is an attractive proposition, particularly for MT applications that demand high throughput.
-
Learning Translation Models from Monolingual Continuous RepresentationsTranslation models often fail to generate good translations for infrequent words or phrases. Previous work attacked this problem by inducing new translation rules from monolingual data with a semi-supervised algorithm. However, this approach does not scale very well since it is very computationally expensive to generate new translation rules for only a few thousand sentences. We propose a much faster and simpler method that directly hallucinates translation rules for infrequent phrases based on phrases with similar continuous representations for which a translation is known. To speed up the retrieval of similar phrases, we investigate approximated nearest neighbor search with redundant bit vectors which we find to be three times faster and significantly more accurate than locality sensitive hashing. Our approach of learning new translation rules improves a phrase-based baseline by up to 1.6 BLEU on Arabic-English translation, it is three-orders of magnitudes faster than existing semi-supervised methods and 0.5 BLEU more accurate.
- All Sessions
- Best Paper Plenary Session
- Invited Talks
- Tutorials
- 1A: Semantics
- 1B: Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing
- 1C: Information Retrieval, Text Categorization, Topic Modeling
- 2A: Generation and Summarization
- 2B: Language and Vision (Long Papers)
- 2C: NLP for Web, Social Media and Social Sciences
- 3A: Generation and Summarization
- 3B: Information Extraction and Question Answering
- 3C: Machine Learning for NLP
- 4A: Dialogue and Spoken Language Processing
- 4B: Machine Learning for NLP
- 4C: Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
- 5A: Semantics
- 5B: Machine Translation
- 5C: Morphology, Syntax, Multilinguality, and Applications
- 6A: Generation and Summarization
- 6B: Discourse and Coreference
- 6C: Information Extraction and Question Answering
- 7A: Semantics
- 7B: Information Extraction and Question Answering
- 7C: Machine Translation
- 8A: NLP for Web, Social Media and Social Sciences
- 8B: Language and Vision
- 9A: Lexical Semantics and Sentiment Analysis
- 9B: NLP-enabled Technology
- 9C: Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects of CL
- 8C: Machine Translation
- Opening remarks