Computational Stylistics In An Integrated Machine Translation System

Abstract: "Comparative stylistics is a subfield of stylistics that attempts to account for the differences in style between languages. Rules of comparative stylistics are commonly presented, in textbooks of translation, as 'rules of thumb', but if we hope to incorporate a knowledge of comparative stylistics into natural language understanding systems, we must take a more formal approach. In particular, we will develop a computational model of comparative stylistics for machine translation that could be used to guide translation and thereby improve the quality of the translated output. An implementation of this model would provide additional information to the machine translation system about the potential modulations to the translated text and their effects, enabling it to make a more informed decision. In this thesis, we develop a set of formal rules of syntactic French-English comparative stylistics to be used as a component of a model of comparative stylistics. As the foundation for the formal rules, we adapt theoretical rules of syntactic French-English comparative stylistics compiled by Guillemin-Flescher [1981] and the formal representation of syntactic style developed by DiMarco [1990]. A corpus of French sentences and their English translations is analyzed to convert the theoretical rules to a set of formal rules that builds on DiMarco's grammars of syntactic style. Thus, we present a formal grammar of French- English comparative stylistics. We also suggest a method for incorporating these rules into an existing machine translation system."

The series serves to propagate investigations into language usage, especially with respect to computational support. This includes all forms of text handling activity, not only interlingual translations, but also conversions carried out in response to different communicative tasks. Among the major topics are problems of text transfer and the interplay between human and machine activities.

This unique book provides a comprehensive introduction to the most popular syntax-based statistical machine translation models, filling a gap in the current literature for researchers and developers in human language technologies. While phrase-based models have previously dominated the field, syntax-based approaches have proved a popular alternative, as they elegantly solve many of the shortcomings of phrase-based models. The heart of this book is a detailed introduction to decoding for syntax-based models. The book begins with an overview of synchronous-context free grammar (SCFG) and synchronous tree-substitution grammar (STSG) along with their associated statistical models. It also describes how three popular instantiations (Hiero, SAMT, and GHKM) are learned from parallel corpora. It introduces and details hypergraphs and associated general algorithms, as well as algorithms for decoding with both tree and string input. Special attention is given to efficiency, including search approximations such as beam search and cube pruning, data structures, and parsing algorithms. The book consistently highlights the strengths (and limitations) of syntax-based approaches, including their ability to generalize phrase-based translation units, their modeling of specific linguistic phenomena, and their function of structuring the search space.

This volume provides an overview of the field of Hybrid Machine Translation (MT) and presents some of the latest research conducted by linguists and practitioners from different multidisciplinary areas. Nowadays, most important developments in MT are achieved by combining data-driven and rule-based techniques. These combinations typically involve hybridization of different traditional paradigms, such as the introduction of linguistic knowledge into statistical approaches to MT, the incorporation of data-driven components into rule-based approaches, or statistical and rule-based pre- and post-processing for both types of MT architectures. The book is of interest primarily to MT specialists, but also – in the wider fields of Computational Linguistics, Machine Learning and Data Mining – to translators and managers of translation companies and departments who are interested in recent developments concerning automated translation tools.

The field of machine translation (MT) - the automation of translation between human languages - has existed for more than 50 years. MT helped to usher in the field of computational linguistics and has influenced methods and applications in knowledge representation, information theory, and mathematical statistics.

Machine translation (MT) is the area of computer science and applied linguistics dealing with the translation of human languages such as English and German. MT on the Internet has become an important tool by providing fast, economical and useful translations. With globalisation and expanding trade, demand for translation is set to grow. Translation Engines covers theoretical and practical aspects of MT, both classic and new, including: - Character sets and formatting languages - Translation memory - Linguistic and computational foundations - Basic computational linguistic techniques - Transfer and interlingua MT - Evaluation Software accompanies the text, providing readers with hands on experience of the main algorithms.

Machine translation of natural languages is one of the most complex and comprehensive applications of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. This is especially true of knowledge-based machine translation (KBMT) systems, which require many knowledge resources and processing modules to carry out the necessary levels of analysis, representation and generation of meaning and form. The number of real-world problems, tasks, and solutions involved in developing any realistic-size knowledge-based machine translation system is enormous. It is thus difficult for researchers in the field to learn what a system "really does". This book fills that need with a detailed case study of a KBMT system implemented at the Center for Machine Translation at Carnegie Mellon University. The research consists in part of the creation of a system for translation between English and Japanese. The corpora used in the project were manuals for installing and maintaining IBM personal computers (sponsorship by IBM, through its Tokyo Research Laboratory) Individual chapters describe the interlingua texts used in knowledge-based machine translation, the grammar formalism embodied in the system, the grammars and lexicons and their roles in the translation process, the process of source language analysis, an augmentation module that interactively and automatically resolves ambiguities remaining after source language analysis, and the generator, which produces target language sentences. Detailed appendices illustrate the process from analysis through generation. This book is intended for developers, researchers and advanced students in natural language processing and computational linguistics, including all those who have an interest in machine translation and machine-aided translation.