Syllabus for Linguistics 571

Syllabus for LING 580

Seminar on Machine Translation

Winter 2006

Instructor: Fei Xia

Time & Location: T 3:30-5:50pm, JHN 111

Office Hours: Friday: 10:30am – 12:30pm

Office Phone: (206) 543-9764

Email: fxia at u

(include "Ling580" in the subject line).

Course website: http://faculty.washington.edu/fxia/courses/LING580MT-Winter2006.shtml

Course Description:

In this seminar, we will discuss important papers on machine translation, and focus on statistical MT and transfer-based MT. Students will gain hands-on experience by experimenting with various methods to improve a phrase-based SMT system.

Course Texts:

None. Reading materials are online.

Prerequisites:

LING 570 and LING 571

Stat 391 (Prob. and Stats for CS) or equivalent

Programming:

- C/C++

- basic unix/linux commands (e.g., ls, cd, ln, sort, head): tutorials on unix

- Perl (optional): tutorials on Perl

Grading:

Leading discussion (50%): each student will present a paper in class.

Term paper (40%).

Class participation (10%).

Schedule:

Week

Date

Topic

Reading

1/3

Introduction to MT

Word-based SMT

1/10

Structural divergence

- Dorr (1994): by Fei

- Hwa (2002): by Jeremy

Dorr (CL, 1994)

Hwa et. al. (ACL, 2002)

1/17

Phrase-based SMT (I)

- Marcu and Wong (2002): by Ping

- Koehn et. al. (2003): by Al

Marcu and Wong (EMNLP, 2002)

Koehn et. al. (NAACL, 2003)

1/24

Phrase-based SMT (II)

- Och and Ney (2002): by Bill

- Och (2003): by Anna

Och and Ney (ACL, 2002)

Och (ACL, 2003)

1/31

Transfer-based SMT (I)

- Wu (1997): by David

- Chiang (2005): by Achim

Wu (1997)

Chiang (ACL, 2005)

2/7

Transfer-based MT (II)

- Yamada and Knight (2001): Gabriel

- Graehl and Knight (2004): Zhengbo

Yamada and Knight (ACL, 2001)

Graehl and Knight (NAACL, 2004)

2/14

Transfer-based MT (III)

- Alshawi et al. (2000): Yow

- Lin (2004): Joshua

Alshawi et. al. (CL, 2000)

Lin (COLING, 2004)

2/21

Transfer-based MT (IV)

- Gildea (2003): Scott

- Gildea (2004): Michael

Gildea (ACL, 2003)

Gildea (EMNLP, 2004)

2/28

Hybrid MT:

- Och et. al. (2003): Part 1: Shauna

- Och et. al. (2003): Part 2: Ethen

Och et. al. (manuscript, 2003a)

3/7

Transfer-based MT (V)

- Burbank et. al. (manuscript, 2005a): Sauleh

Burbank et. al. (manuscript, 2005a)

Reading materials (required):

Divergences:

Bonnie Dorr (CL, 1994): Machine Translation Divergences: A Formal Description and Proposed Solution. Journal of Computational Linguistics, 1994.
Hwa et. al. (ACL, 2002): Evaluating Translational Correspondence using Annotation Projection, In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-02), 2002.

Phrase-based SMT:

Marcu and Wong (EMNLP, 2002): A Phrase-Based, Joint Probability Model for Statistical Machine Translation, In EMNLP-02, 2002.
Koehn et. al. (NAACL, 2003): Statistical Phrase-Based Translation, In Proceedings of the 2003 Meeting of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-03), Edmonton, Alberta, 2003.
Och and Ney (ACL, 2002): Discriminative training and maximum entropy models for statistical machine translation. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-02), Philadelphia, PA, 2002.
Och (ACL, 2003): Minimum Error Rate Training for Statistical Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 41th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-03), 2003.

Transfer-based MT:

DeKai Wu (1997): Stochastic Inversion Transduction Grammars and Bilingual Parsing of Parallel Corpora. Computational Linguistics, 23(3):377-403, 1997.
Chiang (ACL, 2005): A Hierarchical Phrase-Based Model for Statistical Machine Translation, ACL2005.
Yamada and Knight (ACL, 2001): A Syntax-Based Statistical Translation Model. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-01), Toulouse, France, 2001.
Graehl and Knight (NAACL, 2004): Training Tree Transducers. In Proceedings of the 2004 Meeting of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-04), 2004.
Lin (COLING, 2004): A path-based transfer model for MT. COLING 2004.
Alshawi et. al. (CL, 2000): Learning Dependency Translation Models as Collections of Finite-state Head Transducer. Computational Linguistics, 2000.
Daniel Gildea (ACL, 2003): Loosely Tree-Based Alignment for Machine Translation, ACL 2003.
Daniel Gildea (EMNLP, 2004): Dependencies vs. Constituents for Tree-based Alignment, EMNLP 2004.
Burbank et. al. (manuscript, 2005a): JHU 2005 MT workshop final report.
Burbank et. al. (manuscript, 2005b): JHU 2005 MT workshop final presentation.

Hybrid MT:

Och et. al. (manuscript, 2003a): JHU 2003 MT workshop final report.
Och et. al. (manuscript, 2003b): JHU 2003 MT workshop final presentation.

Reference papers: (not required)

Divergences:

David Yarowsky and Grace Ngai (NAACL, 2001): Inducing Multilingual POS Taggers and NP Bracketers via Robust Projection across Aligned Corpora. In Proceedings of the 2001 Meeting of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-01), pages 200-207, 2001.

Word-based SMT:

Brown et. al. (CL, 1993): The Mathematics of Statistical Machine Translation: Parameter estimation. Computational Linguistics, 19(2):263-311, 1993.

Phrase-based SMT:

Feature-Rich Statistical Translation of Noun Phrases , Philipp Koehn and Kevin Knight. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-03), Sapporo, Japan, 2003.

Decoding

Knight (CL, 1999): Decoding Complexity in Word-Replacement Translation Models. Computational Linguistics, 25(4), 1999.
Tillmann and Ney (CL, 2003): Word Reordering and a Dynamic Programming Beam Search Algorithm for Statistical Machine Translation. Computational Linguistics, 29:97-133, 2003.
Germann et. al. (ACL, 2001): Fast Decoding and Optimal Decoding for Machine Translation. Proceedings of the Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2001), Toulouse, France, July 2001.
Germann et. al. (NAACL, 2003): Greedy Decoding for Statistical Machine Translation in Almost Linear Time. Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2003. Edmonton, AB, Canada.

Transfer-based MT:

Wu and Wong (ACL, 1998): Machine Translation with a Stochastic Grammatical Channel. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING/ACL-98), 1998.

Example-based MT:

Sumita and Iida (ACL, 1991): Experiments and Prospects of Example-Based Machine Translation, Eiichiro Sumita and Hitoshi Iida. In 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1991.
Brown (COLING, 1996): Example-Based Machine Translation in the Pangloss System, Ralf D. Brown. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-96), 1996.