Grammatical Machine Translation Stefan Riezler & John Maxwell

Overview 1.Introduction 2.Extracting F-Structure Snippets 3.Parsing-Transfer-Generation 4.Statistical Models and Training 5.Experimental Evaluation 6.Discussion

Section 1: Introduction

Introduction Recent approaches to SMT use Phrase-based SMT Syntactic knowledge Phrase-base SMT is great for Local ordering Short idiomatic expressions But not so good for Learning LDDs Generalising to unseen phrases that share non-overt linguistic info

Statistical Parsers Statistical Parsers can provide information to Resolve LDDs Generalise to unseen phrases that share non-overt linguistic info Examples: Xia & McCord 2004 Collins et al Lin 2004 Ding & Palmer 2005 Quirk et al. 2005

Grammar-based Generation Could grammar-based generation be useful for MT? Quirk et al Simple statistical model outperforms grammar-base generator of Menezes & Richardson 2001 on BLEU score Charniak et al Parsing-based language modelling can improve grammaticality of translations while not improving BLEU score Perhaps BLEU score is not sufficient way to test for grammaticality. Further investigation needed

Grammatical Machine Translation Aim: Investigate incorporating a grammar-based generator into a dependency-based SMT system The authors present: A dependency-based SMT model Statistical components that are modelled on phrase-based system of Koehn et al Also used: Component weights adjusted using MER training (Och 2003) Grammar-based generator N-gram and distortion models

Section 2: Extracting F-Structure Snippets

Extracting F-Structure Snippets SL and TL sentences of bilingual corpus parsed using LFG grammars For each English and German f-structure pair The two f-structures that most preserve dependencies are selected Many-to-many word alignments used to create many-to- many correspondences between the substructures Correspondences are the basis for deciding what goes into the basic transfer rule

Extracting F-Structure Snippets:Example Dafur bin ich zutiefst dankbar  I have a deep appreciation for that Many-to-many bidirectional word alignment:

Transfer Rule Extraction: Example From the aligned words we get the following substructure correspondences:

Transfer Rule Extraction: Example From the correspondences two kinds of transfer rules are extracted: 1.Primitive Transfer Rules 2.Complex Transfer Rules Transfer Contiguity Constraint 1. Source and target f-structures are each connected. 2. F-structures in the transfer source can only be aligned with f-structures in the transfer target and vice versa.

Transfer Rule Extraction: Example Primitive Rule 1: pred( X1, sein) pred( X1, have) subj( X1, X2)  subj( X1, X2) xcomp( X1, X3) obj( X1, X3)

Transfer Rule Extraction: Example Primitive Rule 2: pred( X1, ich)  pred( X1, I)

Transfer Rule Extraction: Example Primitive Rule 3: pred( X1, dafur) pred( X1, for)  obj( X1, X2) pred( X2, that)

Transfer Rule Extraction: Example Primitive Rule 4: pred( X1, dankbar) pred( X1, appreciation) adj( X1, X2)  spec( X1, X2) in_set( X3, X2) pred( X2, a) pred(X3, zutiefst)adj( X1, X3) in_set( X4, X3) pred( X4, deep)

Transfer Rule Extraction: Example Complex Transfer Rules primitive transfer rules that are adjacent in f-structure combined to form more complex rules Example (rules 1 & 2 above): pred( X1, sein) pred( X1, have) subj( X1, X2)  subj( X1, X2) pred( X2, ich) pred( X2, I) xcomp( X1, X3) obj( X1, X3) In the worst case, there can be an exponential number of combinations of primitive transfer rules, the number of primitive rules used to form a complex rule is restricted to 3 – causing the no. of transfer rules taken to be O(n 2 ) in the worst case.

Section 3: Parsing-Transfer-Generation

Parsing LFG grammars used to parse source and target text FRAGMENT grammar is used to augment standard grammar increasing robustness Correct parse determined by fewest chunk method

Transfer Rules applied to source f-structure non- deterministically and in parallel Each fact of German f-structure translated by exactly one transfer rule Default rule included that allows any fact to be translated as itself Chart used to encode translations Beam search decoding used to select the most probable translations

Generation Method of generation has to be fault tolerant Transfer system can be given a fragmentary parse as input Transfer system can output an non-valid f- structure Unknown predicates –Default morphology used to inflect source stem for English Unknown structures –Default grammar used that allows any attribute to be generated in any order with any category

Section 4: Statistical Models & Training

Statistical Components Modelled on statistical components of Pharaoh Paraoh integrates 8 statistical models 1.Relative frequency of phrase translations in source-to- target 2.Relative frequency of phrase translations in target-to- source 3.Lexical weighting in source-to-target 4.Lexical weighting in target-to-source 5.Phrase count 6.Language model probability 7.Word count 8.Distortion probability

Statistical Components Following statistics for each translation: 1.Log-probability of source-to-target transfer rules, where the probability r(e|f) of a rule that transfers source snippet f into target snippet e is estimated by the relative frequency 2. Log-probability of target-to-source rules

Statistical Components 3. Log-probability of lexical translations from source to target snippets, estimated from Viterbi alignments â between source word positions i = 1, …, n and target word positions j = 1, …, m for stems f i and e j in snippets f and e with relative word translation frequencies t(e j |f i ) 4. Log-probability of lexical translations from target-to- source snippets

Statistical Components 5. Number of transfer rule 6. Number of transfer rules with frequency 1 7. Number of default transfer rules 8. Log-probability of strings of predicates from root to frontier of target f-structure, estimated from predicate trigrams of English 9. Number of predicates in target language 10. Number of constituent movements during generation based on the original order of the head predicates of the constituents (for example, AP[2] BP[3] CP[1] counts as two movements since the head predicate of CP moved from first to third position)

Statistical Components 11. Number of generation repairs 12. Log-probability of target string as computed by trigram language model 13. Number of words in target string 1 – 10 are used to choose the most probable parse from the transfer chart 1 – 7 are are tests on source and target f-structure snippets related via transfer rules are language model and distortion features on the target c- and f-structures 11 – 13 are computed on the strings that are generated from the target f-structure The statistics are combined into a log-linear model whose parameters are adjusted by minimum error rate training.

Section 5: ExperimentalEvaluation

Experimental Evaluation Europarl German to English Sents of length 5 – 15 words Training set: 163,141 sents Development set: 1,967 sents Test set: 1,755 sents (same as Koehn et al 2003) Bidirectional word alignment created from word alignment of IBM model 4 as implemented by Giza++ (Och et al. 1999) Grammars achieve 100% coverage on unseen data –80% as full parses –20% as fragment parses 700,000 transfer rules extracted For language modelling trigram model of Stolcke 2002 is used

Experimental Evaluation For translating the test set 1 parse for each German sentence was used 10 transferred f-structures 1,000 generated strings for each transferred f- structure Most probable target f-structure is gotten by a beam search on the transfer chart using features 1-10 above, with a beam size of 20. Features are computed on the strings that are generated

Experimental Evaluation For automatic evaluation they used NIST combined with the approximate randomization test (Noreen, 1999) 6.40*5.62*5.57Full test set *5.99* In-coverage (44%) Phrase- based SMT LFGIBM Model4

Experimental Evaluation Manual Evaluation To separate the factors of grammaticality and translation adequacy 500 sentences randomly extracted from in-coverage examples 2 independent human judges Presented with the output from the phrase-based SMT system and LFG-based system in a blind test and asked them to choose a preference for one of the translations based on –Grammaticality / fluency –Translational / semantic adequacy equal LFG P equalLFGPequalLFGPJ1 \ j2 grammaticalityadequacy

Experimental Evaluation Promising results for examples that are in-coverage of LFG grammars However, back-off to robustness techniques for parsing and generation results in loss of translation quality  Rule Extraction Problems 20% of the parses are fragmental Errors occur in rule extraction process resulting in ill-formed transfer rules Parsing-Transfer-Generation Problems Parsing errors  errors in transfer  generation errors In-coverage  disambiguation errors in parsing and transfer  suboptimal translation

Experimental Evaluation Despite use of minimum error rate training and n-gram language models, the system cannot be used to maximize n-gram scores on reference translations in the same way as phrase-based systems since statistical ordering models are employed in the framework after generation This gives preference to grammaticality over similarity to reference translations

Conclusion SMT model that marries phrase-based SMT with traditional grammar-based MT NIST measure showed that results achieved are comparable with phrase-based SMT system of Koehn et al 2003 for in-coverage examples Manual evaluation showed significant improvements in both grammaticality and translational adequacy for in-coverage examples

Conclusion Determinable with this system whether or not a source sentence is in-coverage Possibility for hybrid system that achieves improved grammaticality at state-of-the-art translation quality Future Work: Improvement of translation of in-coverage source sentences e.g. stochastic generation Apply system to other language pairs and data sets

References Miriam Butt, Dyvik Helge, Tracy King, Hiroshi Masuichi and Christian Rohrer The Parallel Grammar Project. Eugene Charniak, Kevin Knight and Kenji Yamada Syntax-based Language Models for Statistical Machine Translation. Michael Collins, PhilippKoehn and Ivona Kucerova Clause Restructuring for Statistical Machine Translation. Philipp Koehn, Franz Och and Daniel Marcu Statistical Phrase-based Translation. Philipp Koehn Pharaoh: a beam search decoder for phrase-based statistical machine translation Arul Menezes and Stephen Richardson A best-first alignment for automatic extraction of transfer mappings from bilingual corpora. Franz Och, Christoph Tillmann and Ney Hermann Improved Alignment Models for Statistical Machine Translation. Franz Och Minimum error rate training in statistical machine translation. Kishore Papineni, Salim Roukos, Todd Ward and Wei-Jing Zhu BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. Stefan Riezler, Tracy King, Ronald Kaplan, Richard Crouch, John Maxwell and Mark Johnson Parsing the Wall Street Journal using LFG and Discriminative Estimation Techniques Stefan Riezler and John Maxwell Grammatical Machine Translation. Fei Xia and Michael McCord Improving a statistical MT system with automatically learned rewrite patterns