15 Jul 2009

The natlang lab meeting on Thu 7/16/2009 will be in TASC1 9408 at 11:30am.

Manaal Faruqui will be presenting the work he has done during his summer-long MITACS Globalink internship in our lab. Manaal is an undergraduate student in IIT Kharagpur and spent the summer with our lab working on machine translation, collaborating with Baskaran Sankaran and Anoop Sarkar on model adaptation for hierarchical phrase-based machine translation.

Title: Model Adaptation in Statistical Machine Translation for Synchronous Context‐Free Grammars

Abstract:

Hierarchical phrase based translation uses context free grammar rules for decoding source sentences into target language sentences. We derive rules for translation from a parallel corpus which are then exploited to translate sentences. Thus in effect we have a large table containing source and target language phrase pairs composed of terminals and non-terminals.

In this talk we go deeper and explore the case where we have a limited amount of in-domain parallel text for deriving the rules of the given language pair. We assume the availability of a very large amount of out-of-domain parallel text for the same language pair. So we have a large parallel corpus for out-of-domain data and a small parallel corpus for the in-domain data. We carry out experiments to improve the translation score by training our system on the rules from the two domains.

[Presentation slides]