Machine Translation using Tectogrammatics Zdeněk Žabokrtský IFAL, Charles University in Prague

Overview Part I - theoretical background Part II - TectoMT system

MT pyramid (in terms of PDT) Key question in MT: optimal level of abstraction? Our answer: somewhere around tectogrammatics high generalization over different language characteristics, but still computationally (and mentally!) tractable

Basic facts about "Tecto" introduced by Petr Sgall in 1960's implemented in Prague Dep. Treebank 2.0 each sentence represented as a deep-syntactic dependency tree functional words accompanying an autosemantic word "collapse" with it into a single t-node, labeled with the autosemantic t-lemma added t-nodes (e.g. because of pro-drop) semantically indispensable syntactic and morphological categories rendered by a complex system of t-node attributes (functors+subfunctors, grammatemes for tense, number, degree of comparison, etc.)

SMT and limits of growth current state-of-the-art approaches to MT n-grams + large parallel (and also monolingual) corpora + huuuuge computational power n-grams are very greedy! availability (or even existence!) of more data? example: Czech-English parallel data ~1 MW - easy (just download and align some tens of e-books) ~10 MW - doable (parallel corpus Czeng) ~100 MW - not now, but maybe in a couple of years... ~1 GW - ? ~10 GW (~ books) - Was it ever translated???

How could tecto help SMT? n-gram view: manifestations of lexemes are mixed with manifestations of language means expressing the relations between the lexemes and of other grammar rules inflectional endings, agglutinative affixes, functional words, word order, punctuation orthographic rules... It will be delivered to Mr. Green's assistants at the nearest meeting.  training data sparsity how could tecto ideas help? within each sentence, clear separation of meaningful "signs" from "signs" which are only imposed by grammar (e.g. imposed by agreement) clear separation of lexical, syntactical and morphological meaning components  modularization of the translation task  potential for a better structuring of statistical models  more effective exploatation of the limited training data

"Semitecto" abstract sentence representation, tailored for MT purposes motivation: not to make decisions which are not really necessary for the MT process (such as distinguishing between many types of temporal and directional semantic complementations) given the target-language "semitecto" tree, we want the sentence generation to be deterministic slightly "below" tecto (w.r.t. the abstraction axis): adopting the idea of separating lexical, syntactical and morphological meaning components; adopting the t-tree topology principles adopting many t-node attributes (especially grammatemes, coreference, etc.) but (almost) no functors, no subfunctors, no WSD, no pointers to valency dictionary, no tfa... closer to the surface-syntax main innovation: concept of formemes

Formemes formeme = morphosyntactic language means expressing the dependency relation n:v+6 (in Czech) = semantic noun which is on the surface expressed in the form of prepositional group in locative with preposition "v" v:that+fin/a (in English) = semantic verb expressed in active voice as a head of subordinating clause introduced with the sub.conjunction "that" obviously, sets of formeme values are specific for each of the four semantic parts of speech in fact, formemes are edge labels partially substituting functors what is NOT captured by formemes: morphological categories imposed by grammar rules (esp. by agreement), such as gender, number and case for adjectives in attributive positions morphological categories already represented by grammatemes, such as degree of comparison for adjectives, tense for verbs, number for nouns

Formemes in the tree Example: It is extremely important that Iraq held elections to a constitutional assembly.

Some more examples of proposed formemes Czech 968 adj:attr 604 n:1 552 n:2 497 v:fin/a 308 n:4 260 adv: 169 n:v adj:compl 117 v:inf 104 n:poss 86 n:7 82 v:že+fin/a 77 v:rc/a 63 n:s+7 53 n:k+3 53 n:attr 50 n:na+6 47 n:na+4 42 v:aby+fin/a English 661 adj:attr 568 n:attr 456 n:subj 413 n:obj 370 v:fin/a 273 n:of+X 238 adv: 160 n:poss 160 n:in+X 146 v:to+inf/a 92 adj:compl 91 n:to+X v:rc/a v:that+fin/a v:ger/a

Three-way transfer translation process: (I have been asked by him to come -> Požádal mě, abych přišel) 1. source language sentence analysis up to the "semitecto" layer 2. tranfer of lexemes (ask  požádat, come  přijít ) formemes (v:fin/p  v:fin/a, v:to+inf  v:aby+fin/a) grammatemes (tense=past1  past, 0  verbmod=cdn) 3. target language sentence synthesis from the "semitecto" layer

Adding statistics... P(l T |l S ) P(f T |f S ) P(l gov,l dep,f) source language target language translation model (e.g. from parallel corpus Czeng, 30MW) "binode" language model (e.g. from partially parsed Czech National Corpus, 100MW)

Part II TectoMT System

Goals primary goal to build a high-quality linguistically motivated MT system using the PDT layered framework, starting with English -> Czech direction secondary goals to create a system for testing the true usefulness of various NLP tools within a real-life application to exploit the abstraction power of tectogrammatics to supply data and technology for other projects

Main design decisions Linux + Perl set of well-defined, linguistically relevant levels of language representation neutral w.r.t. chosen methodology (e.g. rules vs. statistics) in-house OO architecture as the backbone,but easy incorporation of external tools (parsers, taggers, lemmatizers etc.) accent on modularity: translation scenario as a sequence of translation blocks (modules corresponding to individual NLP subtasks) source language target language MT triangle: interlingua tectogram. surf.synt. morpho. raw text.

TectoMT - Example of analysis (1) Sample sentence: It is extremely important that Iraq held elections to a constitutional assembly.

TectoMT - example of analysis (2) phrase-structure tree:

TectoMT - example of analysis (3) analytical tree

TectoMT - example of analysis (4) tectogrammatical tree (with formemes)

Heuristic alignment Sentence pair: It is extremely important that Iraq held elections to a constitutional assembly. Je nesmírně důležité, že v Iráku proběhly volby do ústavního shromáždění.

Formeme pairs extracted from parallel aligned trees 593 adj:attr adj:attr 290 v:fin/a v:fin/a 282 n:1 n:subj 214 adj:attr n:attr 165 n:2 n:of+X 152 adv: adv: 149 n:4 n:obj 102 n:2 n:attr 86 n:v+6 n:in+X 79 n:poss n:poss 73 n:1 n:obj 61 n:2 n:obj 51 v:inf v:to+inf/a 50 adj:compl adj:compl 39 n:2 n: 34 n:4 n:subj 34 n:attr n:attr 32 v:že+fin/a v:that+fin/a 32 n:2 n:poss 27 n:4 n:attr 27 n:2 n:subj 26 adj:attr n:poss 25 v:rc/a v:rc/a 20 v:aby+fin/a v:to+inf/a

Thank you !