Contextual Text Style Transfer

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Contextual Text Style Transfer Contextual Text Style Transfer Yu Cheng1, Zhe Gan1, Yizhe Zhang2, Oussama Elachqar2, Dianqi Li3, Jingjing Liu1 1Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI Research 2Microsoft Research 3University of Washington fyu.cheng,zhe.gan,yizhe.zhang,ouelachq,[email protected], [email protected] Abstract 2017; Li et al., 2018; Prabhumoye et al., 2018; Subramanian et al., 2018), assuming that disentan- We introduce a new task, Contextual Text gling style information from semantic content can Style Transfer - translating a sentence into be achieved in an auto-encoding fashion with the a desired style with its surrounding context taken into account. This brings two key chal- introduction of additional regularizers (e.g., adver- lenges to existing style transfer approaches: sarial discriminators (Shen et al., 2017), language (i) how to preserve the semantic meaning of models (Yang et al., 2018)). target sentence and its consistency with sur- Despite promising results, these techniques still rounding context during transfer; (ii) how have a long way to go for practical use. Most to train a robust model with limited labeled existing models focus on sentence-level rewriting. data accompanied by context. To realize However, in real-world applications, sentences typ- high-quality style transfer with natural con- text preservation, we propose a Context-Aware ically reside in a surrounding paragraph context. In Style Transfer (CAST) model, which uses two formalized writing, the rewritten span is expected separate encoders for each input sentence and to align well with the surrounding context to keep its surrounding context. A classifier is fur- a coherent semantic flow. For example, to auto- ther trained to ensure contextual consistency matically replace a gender-biased sentence in a job of the generated sentence. To compensate description document, a style transfer model tak- for the lack of parallel data, additional self- ing the sentence out of context may not be able reconstruction and back-translation losses are to understand the proper meaning of the statement introduced to leverage non-parallel data in a semi-supervised fashion. Two new bench- and the intended message. Taking a single sen- marks, Enron-Context and Reddit-Context, are tence as the sole input of a style transfer model introduced for formality and offensiveness may fail in preserving topical coherency between style transfer. Experimental results on these the generated sentence and its surrounding context, datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the leading to low semantic and logical consistency proposed CAST model over state-of-the-art on the paragraph level (see Example C in Table4). methods across style accuracy, content preser- Similar observations can be found in other style vation and contextual consistency metrics.1 transfer tasks, such as offensive to non-offensive 1 Introduction and political to neutral translations. Motivated by this, we propose and investigate a Text style transfer has been applied to many appli- new task - Contextual Text Style Transfer. Given a cations (e.g., sentiment manipulation, formalized paragraph, the system aims to translate sentences writing) with remarkable success. Early work relies into a desired style, while keeping the edited sec- on parallel corpora with a sequence-to-sequence tion topically coherent with its surrounding context. learning framework (Bahdanau et al., 2015; Jham- To achieve this goal, we propose a novel Context- tani et al., 2017). However, collecting parallel an- Aware Style Transfer (CAST) model, by jointly notations is highly time-consuming and expensive. considering style translation and context alignment. There has also been studies on developing text style To leverage parallel training data, CAST employs transfer models with non-parallel data (Hu et al., two separate encoders to encode the source sen- 1Code and datasets will be released at https:// tence and its surrounding context, respectively. github.com/ych133/CAST. With the encoded sentence and context embed- 2915 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 2915–2924 November 16 - 20, 2020. c 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics dings, a decoder is trained to translate the joint tences in different styles. For example, Jhamtani features into a new sentence in a specific style. et al.(2017) pre-trained word embeddings by lever- A pre-trained style classifier is applied for style aging external dictionaries mapping Shakespearean regularization, and a coherence classifier learns to words to modern English words and additional text. regularize the generated target sentence to be con- However, available parallel data in different styles sistent with the context. To overcome data sparsity are very limited. Therefore, there is a recent surge issue, we further introduce a set of unsupervised of interest in considering a more realistic setting, training objectives (e.g., self-reconstruction loss, where only non-parallel stylized corpora are avail- back-translation loss) to leverage non-parallel data able. A typical approach is: (i) disentangling la- in a hybrid approach (Shang et al., 2019). The final tent space as content and style features; then (ii) CAST model is jointly trained with both parallel generating stylistic sentences by tweaking style- and non-parallel data via end-to-end training. relevant features and passing them through a de- As this is a newly proposed task, we intro- coder, together with the original content-relevant duce two new datasets, Enron-Context and Reddit- features (Xu et al., 2018). Context, collected via crowdsourcing. The former Many of these approaches borrowed the idea of contains 14,734 formal vs. informal paired sam- adversarial discriminator/classifier from the Gen- ples from Enron (Klimt and Yang, 2004) (an email erative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework dataset), and the latter contains 23,158 offensive (Goodfellow et al., 2014). For example, Shen vs. non-offensive paired samples from Reddit (Ser- et al.(2017); Fu et al.(2018); Lample et al.(2018) ban et al., 2017). Each sample contains an origi- used adversarial classifiers to force the decoder nal sentence and a human-rewritten one in target to transfer the encoded source sentence into a style, accompanied by its paragraph context. In different style/language. Alternatively, Li et al. experiments, we also leverage 60k formal/informal (2018) achieved disentanglement by filtering stylis- sentences from GYAFC (Rao and Tetreault, 2018) tic words of input sentences. Another direction and 100k offensive/non-offensive sentences from for text style transfer without parallel data is using Reddit (dos Santos et al., 2018) as additional non- back-translation (Prabhumoye et al., 2018) with a parallel data for model training. de-noising auto-encoding objective (Logeswaran The main contributions of this work are sum- et al., 2018; Subramanian et al., 2018). marized as follows: (i) We propose a new task - Regarding the tasks, sentiment transfer is one Contextual Text Style Transfer, which aims to trans- of the most widely studied problems. Transferring late a sentence into a desired style while preserv- from informality to formality (Rao and Tetreault, ing its style-agnostic semantics and topical consis- 2018; Li et al., 2019) is another direction of text tency with the surrounding context. (ii) We intro- style transfer, aiming to change the style of a given duce two new datasets for this task, Enron-Context sentence to more formal text. dos Santos et al. and Reddit-Context, which provide strong bench- (2018) presented an approach to transferring offen- marks for evaluating contextual style transfer mod- sive text to non-offensive based on social network els. (iii) We present a new model - Context-Aware data. In Prabhumoye et al.(2018), the authors pro- Style Transfer (CAST), which jointly optimizes the posed the political slant transfer task. However, generation quality of target sentence and its topical all these previous studies did not directly consider coherency with adjacent context. Extensive exper- context-aware text style transfer, which is the main iments on the new datasets demonstrate that the focus of this work. proposed CAST model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art style transfer models. 2.2 Context-aware Text Generation 2 Related Work Our work is related to context-aware text genera- tion (Mikolov and Zweig, 2012; Tang et al., 2016), 2.1 Text Style Transfer which can be applied to many NLP tasks (Man- Text style transfer aims to modify an input sen- grulkar et al., 2018). For example, previous work tence into a desired style while preserving its style- has investigated language modeling with context in- independent semantics. Previous work has ex- formation (Wang and Cho, 2015; Wang et al., 2017; plored this as a sequence-to-sequence learning task Li et al., 2020), treating the preceding sentences using parallel corpora with paired source/target sen- as context. There are also studies on response gen- 2916 Context Coherence (Contextual Context Context Encoder Classifier Coherence Loss) Sentence Target style Target (Contextual Seq2Seq Loss) Decoder Sentence Input Encoder CAST with parallel data Sentence Original style Recon. (Reconstruction Loss) Decoder Sentence Style Input (Style Classification Loss) Encoder Classifier Sentence Target style Trans. Decoder Sentence Sentence Recon. (Back-Translation Loss) Encoder Decoder Original style CAST with non-parallel data Figure 1: Model architecture of the proposed CAST model for contextual text style
Recommended publications
  • Champollion: a Robust Parallel Text Sentence Aligner
    Champollion: A Robust Parallel Text Sentence Aligner Xiaoyi Ma Linguistic Data Consortium 3600 Market St. Suite 810 Philadelphia, PA 19104 [email protected] Abstract This paper describes Champollion, a lexicon-based sentence aligner designed for robust alignment of potential noisy parallel text. Champollion increases the robustness of the alignment by assigning greater weights to less frequent translated words. Experiments on a manually aligned Chinese – English parallel corpus show that Champollion achieves high precision and recall on noisy data. Champollion can be easily ported to new language pairs. It’s freely available to the public. framework to find the maximum likelihood alignment of 1. Introduction sentences. Parallel text is a very valuable resource for a number The length based approach works remarkably well on of natural language processing tasks, including machine language pairs with high length correlation, such as translation (Brown et al. 1993; Vogel and Tribble 2002; French and English. Its performance degrades quickly, Yamada and Knight 2001;), cross language information however, when the length correlation breaks down, such retrieval, and word disambiguation. as in the case of Chinese and English. Parallel text provides the maximum utility when it is Even with language pairs with high length correlation, sentence aligned. The sentence alignment process maps the Gale-Church algorithm may fail at regions that contain sentences in the source text to their translation. The labor many sentences with similar length. A number of intensive and time consuming nature of manual sentence algorithms, such as (Wu 1994), try to overcome the alignment makes large parallel text corpus development weaknesses of length based approaches by utilizing lexical difficult.
    [Show full text]
  • The Web As a Parallel Corpus
    The Web as a Parallel Corpus Philip Resnik∗ Noah A. Smith† University of Maryland Johns Hopkins University Parallel corpora have become an essential resource for work in multilingual natural language processing. In this article, we report on our work using the STRAND system for mining parallel text on the World Wide Web, first reviewing the original algorithm and results and then presenting a set of significant enhancements. These enhancements include the use of supervised learning based on structural features of documents to improve classification performance, a new content- based measure of translational equivalence, and adaptation of the system to take advantage of the Internet Archive for mining parallel text from the Web on a large scale. Finally, the value of these techniques is demonstrated in the construction of a significant parallel corpus for a low-density language pair. 1. Introduction Parallel corpora—bodies of text in parallel translation, also known as bitexts—have taken on an important role in machine translation and multilingual natural language processing. They represent resources for automatic lexical acquisition (e.g., Gale and Church 1991; Melamed 1997), they provide indispensable training data for statistical translation models (e.g., Brown et al. 1990; Melamed 2000; Och and Ney 2002), and they can provide the connection between vocabularies in cross-language information retrieval (e.g., Davis and Dunning 1995; Landauer and Littman 1990; see also Oard 1997). More recently, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the
    [Show full text]
  • Resourcing Machine Translation with Parallel Treebanks John Tinsley
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by DCU Online Research Access Service Resourcing Machine Translation with Parallel Treebanks John Tinsley A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) to the Dublin City University School of Computing Supervisor: Prof. Andy Way December 2009 I hereby certify that this material, which I now submit for assessment on the programme of study leading to the award of Ph.D. is entirely my own work, that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge breach any law of copyright, and has not been taken from the work of others save and to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work. Signed: (Candidate) ID No.: Date: Contents Abstract vii Acknowledgements viii List of Figures ix List of Tables x 1 Introduction 1 2 Background and the Current State-of-the-Art 7 2.1 ParallelTreebanks ............................ 7 2.1.1 Sub-sentential Alignment . 9 2.1.2 Automatic Approaches to Tree Alignment . 12 2.2 Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation . ...... 14 2.2.1 WordAlignment ......................... 17 2.2.2 Phrase Extraction and Translation Models . 18 2.2.3 ScoringandtheLog-LinearModel . 22 2.2.4 LanguageModelling . 25 2.2.5 Decoding ............................. 27 2.3 Syntax-Based Machine Translation . 29 2.3.1 StatisticalTransfer-BasedMT . 30 2.3.2 Data-OrientedTranslation . 33 2.3.3 OtherApproaches ........................ 35 2.4 MTEvaluation.............................
    [Show full text]
  • Towards Controlled Counterfactual Generation for Text
    The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21) Generate Your Counterfactuals: Towards Controlled Counterfactual Generation for Text Nishtha Madaan, Inkit Padhi, Naveen Panwar, Diptikalyan Saha 1IBM Research AI fnishthamadaan, naveen.panwar, [email protected], [email protected] Abstract diversity will ensure high coverage of the input space de- fined by the goal. In this paper, we aim to generate such Machine Learning has seen tremendous growth recently, counterfactual text samples which are also effective in find- which has led to a larger adoption of ML systems for ed- ing test-failures (i.e. label flips for NLP classifiers). ucational assessments, credit risk, healthcare, employment, criminal justice, to name a few. Trustworthiness of ML and Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in the work NLP systems is a crucial aspect and requires guarantee that on fairness testing (Ma, Wang, and Liu 2020; Holstein et al. the decisions they make are fair and robust. Aligned with 2019) which are capable of generating a large number of this, we propose a framework GYC, to generate a set of coun- test-cases that capture the model’s ability to misclassify or terfactual text samples, which are crucial for testing these remove unwanted bias around specific protected attributes ML systems. Our main contributions include a) We introduce (Huang et al. 2019), (Garg et al. 2019). This is not only lim- GYC, a framework to generate counterfactual samples such ited to fairness but the community has seen great interest that the generation is plausible, diverse, goal-oriented and ef- in building robust models susceptible to adversarial changes fective, b) We generate counterfactual samples, that can direct (Goodfellow, Shlens, and Szegedy 2014; Michel et al.
    [Show full text]
  • Natural Language Processing Security- and Defense-Related Lessons Learned
    July 2021 Perspective EXPERT INSIGHTS ON A TIMELY POLICY ISSUE PETER SCHIRMER, AMBER JAYCOCKS, SEAN MANN, WILLIAM MARCELLINO, LUKE J. MATTHEWS, JOHN DAVID PARSONS, DAVID SCHULKER Natural Language Processing Security- and Defense-Related Lessons Learned his Perspective offers a collection of lessons learned from RAND Corporation projects that employed natural language processing (NLP) tools and methods. It is written as a reference document for the practitioner Tand is not intended to be a primer on concepts, algorithms, or applications, nor does it purport to be a systematic inventory of all lessons relevant to NLP or data analytics. It is based on a convenience sample of NLP practitioners who spend or spent a majority of their time at RAND working on projects related to national defense, national intelligence, international security, or homeland security; thus, the lessons learned are drawn largely from projects in these areas. Although few of the lessons are applicable exclusively to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and its NLP tasks, many may prove particularly salient for DoD, because its terminology is very domain-specific and full of jargon, much of its data are classified or sensitive, its computing environment is more restricted, and its information systems are gen- erally not designed to support large-scale analysis. This Perspective addresses each C O R P O R A T I O N of these issues and many more. The presentation prioritizes • identifying studies conducting health service readability over literary grace. research and primary care research that were sup- We use NLP as an umbrella term for the range of tools ported by federal agencies.
    [Show full text]
  • A User Interface-Level Integration Method for Multiple Automatic Speech Translation Systems
    A User Interface-Level Integration Method for Multiple Automatic Speech Translation Systems Seiya Osada1, Kiyoshi Yamabana1, Ken Hanazawa1, Akitoshi Okumura1 1 Media and Information Research Laboratories NEC Corporation 1753, Shimonumabe, Nakahara-Ku, Kawasaki, Kanagawa 211-8666, Japan {s-osada@cd, k-yamabana@ct, k-hanazawa@cq, a-okumura@bx}.jp.nec.com Abstract. We propose a new method to integrate multiple speech translation systems based on user interface-level integration. Users can select the result of free-sentence speech translation or that of registered sentence translation without being conscious of the configuration of the automatic speech translation system. We implemented this method on a portable device. Keywords: speech translation, user interface, machine translation, registered sentence retrieval, speech recognition 1 Introduction There have been many researches on speech-to-speech translation systems, such as NEC speech translation system[1], ATR-MATRIX[2] and Verbmobil[3]. These speech-to-speech translation systems include at least three components: speech recognition, machine translation, and speech synthesis. However, in practice, each component does not always output the correct result for various inputs. In actual use of a speech-to-speech translation system with a display, the speaker using the system can examine the result of speech recognition on the display. Accordingly, when the recognition result is inappropriate, the speaker can correct errors by speaking again to the system. Similarly, when the result of speech synthesis is not correct, the listener using the system can examine the source sentence of speech synthesis on the display. On the other hand, the feature of machine translation is different from that of speech recognition or speech synthesis, because neither the speaker nor the listener using the system can confirm the result of machine translation.
    [Show full text]
  • Lines: an English-Swedish Parallel Treebank
    LinES: An English-Swedish Parallel Treebank Lars Ahrenberg NLPLab, Human-Centered Systems Department of Computer and Information Science Link¨opings universitet [email protected] Abstract • We can investigate the distribution of differ- ent kinds of shifts in different sub-corpora and This paper presents an English-Swedish Par- characterize the translation strategy used in allel Treebank, LinES, that is currently un- terms of these distributions. der development. LinES is intended as a resource for the study of variation in trans- In this paper the focus is mainly on the second as- lation of common syntactic constructions pect, i.e., on identifying translation correspondences from English to Swedish. For this rea- of various kinds and presenting them to the user. son, annotation in LinES is syntactically ori- When two segments correspond under translation ented, multi-level, complete and manually but differ in structure or meaning, we talk of a trans- reviewed according to guidelines. Another lation shift (Catford, 1965). Translation shifts are aim of LinES is to support queries made in common in translation even for languages that are terms of types of translation shifts. closely related and may occur for various reasons. This paper has its focus on structural shifts, i.e., on 1 Introduction changes in syntactic properties and relations. Translation shifts have been studied mainly by The empirical turn in computational linguistics has translation scholars but is also of relevance to ma- spurred the development of ever new types of basic chine translation, as the occurrence of translation linguistic resources. Treebanks are now regarded as shifts is what makes translation difficult.
    [Show full text]
  • Cross-Lingual Bootstrapping of Semantic Lexicons: the Case of Framenet
    Cross-lingual Bootstrapping of Semantic Lexicons: The Case of FrameNet Sebastian Padó Mirella Lapata Computational Linguistics, Saarland University School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh P.O. Box 15 11 50, 66041 Saarbrücken, Germany 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK [email protected] [email protected] Abstract Frame: COMMITMENT This paper considers the problem of unsupervised seman- tic lexicon acquisition. We introduce a fully automatic ap- SPEAKER Kim promised to be on time. proach which exploits parallel corpora, relies on shallow text ADDRESSEE Kim promised Pat to be on time. properties, and is relatively inexpensive. Given the English MESSAGE Kim promised Pat to be on time. FrameNet lexicon, our method exploits word alignments to TOPIC The government broke its promise generate frame candidate lists for new languages, which are about taxes. subsequently pruned automatically using a small set of lin- Frame Elements MEDIUM Kim promised in writing to sell Pat guistically motivated filters. Evaluation shows that our ap- the house. proach can produce high-precision multilingual FrameNet lexicons without recourse to bilingual dictionaries or deep consent.v, covenant.n, covenant.v, oath.n, vow.n, syntactic and semantic analysis. pledge.v, promise.n, promise.v, swear.v, threat.n, FEEs threaten.v, undertake.v, undertaking.n, volunteer.v Introduction Table 1: Example frame from the FrameNet database Shallow semantic parsing, the task of automatically identi- fying the semantic roles conveyed by sentential constituents, is an important step towards text understanding and can ul- instance, the SPEAKER is typically an NP, whereas the MES- timately benefit many natural language processing applica- SAGE is often expressed as a clausal complement (see the ex- tions ranging from information extraction (Surdeanu et al.
    [Show full text]
  • Parallel Texts
    Natural Language Engineering 11 (3): 239–246. c 2005 Cambridge University Press 239 doi:10.1017/S1351324905003827 Printed in the United Kingdom Parallel texts RADA MIHALCEA Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of North Texas, P.O. Box 311366, Denton, TX 76203 USA e-mail: [email protected] MICHEL SIMARD Xerox Research Centre Europe, 6, Chemin de Maupertuis, 38240 Meylan, France e-mail: [email protected] (Received May 1 2004; revised November 30 2004 ) Abstract Parallel texts1 have become a vital element for natural language processing. We present a panorama of current research activities related to parallel texts, and offer some thoughts about the future of this rich field of investigation. 1 Introduction Parallel texts have become a vital element in many areas of natural language processing (NLP). They represent one of the richest and most versatile sources of knowledge for NLP, and have been used successfully not only in problems that are intrinsically multilingual, such as machine translation and cross-lingual information retrieval, but also as an indirect way of attacking “monolingual” problems, for example in semantic and syntactic analysis. Why have parallel texts proven such a fruitful resource? Most likely because of their ability to represent meaning: the translation of a text in another language can be seen as a semantic representation of that text, which opens the doors to a tremendously large number of language processing applications that operate on such representations. In his famous memorandum from 1949, Warren Weaver wrote: “When I look at an article in Russian, I say: ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols.
    [Show full text]
  • Open Architecture for Multilingual Parallel Texts M.T
    Open architecture for multilingual parallel texts M.T. Carrasco Benitez Luxembourg, 28 August 2008, version 1 1. Abstract Multilingual parallel texts (abbreviated to parallel texts) are linguistic versions of the same content (“translations”); e.g., the Maastricht Treaty in English and Spanish are parallel texts. This document is about creating an open architecture for the whole Authoring, Translation and Publishing Chain (ATP-chain) for the processing of parallel texts. 2. Summary 2.1. Next steps The next steps should be: • Administrative organisation: create a coordinating organisation and approach the existing organisations that might cooperate; e.g., IETF, LISA, OASIS, W3C. • Public discussion: with an emailing list (or similar) to reach a rough consensus, in particular on aspects such as the required specifications. Organise the necessary meeting(s). • Tools: implement some tools. This might be done simultaneously with the public discussion to better illustrate the approach and support the discussion. 2.2. Best approaches To obtain the best quality, speed and the lowest possible cost (QSC) in the production of parallel texts, one should aim for: • Generating all the linguistic versions ready for publication, from linguistic resources. Probably one of the best approaches. • Seamless ATP-chain implementations. • Authoring: Computer-aided authoring (CAA) tools with a controlled authoring environment; it should deliver source texts prepared for translation. • Translation: Computer-aided translation (CAT) tools to allow translators to focus only in translating and unburden translators from auxiliary tasks such as formatting. These tools should have functionalities such as side-by-side editor and the re-use of previous translations. • Publishing: Computer-aided publishing (CAP) tools to minimise human intervention.
    [Show full text]
  • Unsupervised Learning of Cross-Modal Mappings Between
    Unsupervised Learning of Cross-Modal Mappings between Speech and Text by Yu-An Chung B.S., National Taiwan University (2016) Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY June 2019 c Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2019. All rights reserved. Author.............................................................. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science May 3, 2019 Certified by. James R. Glass Senior Research Scientist in Computer Science Thesis Supervisor Accepted by . Leslie A. Kolodziejski Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Chair, Department Committee on Graduate Students 2 Unsupervised Learning of Cross-Modal Mappings between Speech and Text by Yu-An Chung Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science on May 3, 2019, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Abstract Deep learning is one of the most prominent machine learning techniques nowadays, being the state-of-the-art on a broad range of applications in computer vision, nat- ural language processing, and speech and audio processing. Current deep learning models, however, rely on significant amounts of supervision for training to achieve exceptional performance. For example, commercial speech recognition systems are usually trained on tens of thousands of hours of annotated data, which take the form of audio paired with transcriptions for training acoustic models, collections of text for training language models, and (possibly) linguist-crafted lexicons mapping words to their pronunciations. The immense cost of collecting these resources makes applying state-of-the-art speech recognition algorithm to under-resourced languages infeasible.
    [Show full text]
  • BITS: a Method for Bilingual Text Search Over the Web
    BITS: A Method for Bilingual Text Search over the Web Xiaoyi Ma, Mark Y. Liberman Linguistic Data Consortium 3615 Market St. Suite 200 Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA {xma,myl}@ldc.upenn.edu Abstract Parallel corpus are valuable based, only a few are statistical machine resource for machine translation, multi- translation. Some scholars believe that the lack lingual text retrieval, language education of large parallel corpora makes statistical and other applications, but for various approach impossible, the researchers don’t have reasons, its availability is very limited at large enough parallel corpuses to give some present. Noticed that the World Wide language pairs a shot. Web is a potential source to mine parallel However, the unexplored World Wide Web text, researchers are making their efforts could be a good resource to find large-size and to explore the Web in order to get a big balanced parallel text. According to the web collection of bitext. This paper presents survey we did in 1997, 1 of 10 de domain BITS (Bilingual Internet Text Search), a websites are German – English bilingual, the system which harvests multilingual texts number of de domain websites is about 150,000 over the World Wide Web with virtually at that time, so there might be 50,000 German – no human intervention. The technique is English bilingual websites in de domain alone. simple, easy to port to any language pairs, Things are changing since a potential gold mine and with high accuracy. The results of the of parallel text, the World Wide Web, has been experiments on German – English pair discovered.
    [Show full text]