Gaussian alignments in statistical translation models

Machine translation software has been under development almost since the birth of the electronic computer. Current state-of-the-art methods use statistical techniques to learn how to translate from one natural language to another from a corpus of hand-translated text. The success of these techniques comes from two factors: a simple statistical model and vast training data sets. The standard agenda for improving such models is to enable it to model greater complexity; however, it is a byword within the machine learning community that added complexity must be supported with more training data. Given that current models already require huge amounts of data, our agenda is instead to simplify current models before adding extensions. We present one such simplification, which results in fewer than 10% as many alignment model parameters and produces results competitive with the original model. An unexpected benefit of this technique is that it naturally gives a measure for how difficult it is to translate from one language to another given a data set. Next, we present one suggestion for adding complexity to model new behavior.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Mohammad, Ali (Ali H.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Michael J. Collins.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/35611

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35611