Machine Translation via Dependency Transfer Philip Resnik University of Maryland DoD MURI award in collaboration with JHU: Bootstrapping Out of the Multilingual Resource Bottleneck Start date: May, 2001

Current statistical MT IBM models 1-5 –Fail to model syntactic dependencies –Don’t take advantage of morphological features Bilingual grammar approaches –Have not evolved into a stochastic setting (SyTAG) –Model constituency rather than dependency (SITG) Dependency transduction models –Are linguistically underconstrained –Don’t take advantage of asymmetrical resources

Modeling richer linguistic features: syntactic dependency I-ergMYBROTHER-datGIFT aBUY-pastWEDDING niknireanaiariopari baterosi nionezkontza weddingIgotformybrotheragift subjobj nnprpvbdinprp$nndtnn prpprp$nn vbd

JJVBGINNNP NNS mod S pobj PLACE [ National laws ] applying in [ Hong Kong ] analysis projection The urgent response to... New Statistical MT Models ….…. NNJJ NN mod ][ translation and analysis of new data training [][] INNNP VBG NNS JJ Hong In Kong nationallaw(s)implementing of [ National laws ] applying in [ Hong Kong ] JJVBGINNNP NNS mod subj mod pobj PLACE mod subj PLACE

Baseline Dependency Transfer Architecture Parallel text GIZA++ Minipar (Lin) Collins parser Parser Training Source text Lexical selection Linearization Target text English-specific processing Language-specific processing INNN P VBGNNSJJ Hong In Kong nationallaw(s)implementing of [National laws] applying in [Hong Kong] JJVBGINNNP NNS mod subj mod pobj mod subj mod pobj

Parser Gold Standard Development Test set:188 English-Chinese sentence pairs from the Penn Chinese Treebank Two bilingual annotators Independent extraction of dependency triples Precision/recall –Inter-annotator –Projected Chinese dependency trees –Trained parser dependency tree output

Research Targets Rapid, automatic creation resources and tools Models for effective use of noisy training data Non-direct transfer: improving alignment models using lexical decomposition Monolingual parsing performance versus effective transfer to English Evaluation of dependency transfer on MT performance