Empirical Machine Translation

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Groups	People
ATR SLT	Kenji Imamura; Michael Paul; Eiichiro Sumita; Taro Watanabe
Berkeley	Alexandre Bouchard-Cote; Percy Liang; Dan Klein; Ben Taskar
Brown University	Eugene Charniak; Heidi J. Fox
CMU - LTI (ISL)	Jaime Carbonell; John Lafferty; Alon Lavie; Ashish Venugopal; Stephan Vogel; Alex Waibel; Bing Zhao
Columbia University	Mona Diab; Michel Galley ; Nizar Habash
Google	Franz Josef Och, Richard Zens
Harvard University	Alex Kulesza; Stuart M. Shieber
HKUST HLTC	Dekai Wu
IBM Watson Research Center	Peter F. Brown; Vincent J. Della Pietra; Christoph Tillmann :: Kishore Papineni; Tong Zhang;
ISI	Alexander Fraser; Ulrich Germann; Eduard Hovy; Kevin Knight; Daniel Marcu; Dragos Stefan Munteanu; David Chiang :: Kenji Yamada; Franz Josef Och; Philipp Koehn; Chin-Yew Lin
JHU	Jason Eisner; Noah A. Smith; David A. Smith; David Yarowsky
LIMSI	Josep Maria Crego
Microsoft	Chris Brockett; William Dolan; ChristopherB. Quirk Chin-Yew Lin;
MIT Boston	Michael Collins; Brooke Cowan; Philipp Koehn; Ivona Kucerova
New York University (NYU)	Dan Melamed
Samon Fraser University	Anoop Sarkar
Stanford University	Daniel Jurafsky; Chris Manning; Kristina Toutanova :: Mona Diab
University of Aachen (RWTH)	Oliver Bender; Hermann Ney; Nicola Ueffing :: Franz Josef Och; Stephan Vogel, Richard Zens
Universitat d'Alacant	Mikel L. Forcada
University of Alberta	Colin Cherry; Dekang Lin
University of California	Mark Hopkins
University of Colorado	Martha Palmer
University of Cambridge	Bill Byrne; Adrià de Gispert
University of Edinburgh	Philipp Koehn
University of Maryland (UMIACS)	Bonnie J. Dorr; Philip Resnik
University of Montreal (RALI)	George Foster
University of Pennsylvania	Liang Huang; Ben Taskar :: Martha Palmer; Yuan Ding
University of Rochester	Daniel Gildea; Hao Zhang
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (TALP)	Jesús Giménez; Lluís Màrquez; Marta Ruiz; Adrián Fonollosa:: Josep M. Crego; Adrià de Gispert; Patrik Lambert;
Universitat Politècnica de València (ITI)	Francisco Casacuberta; Enrique Vidal
University of Uppsala	Jörg Tiedemann
Xerox	Kenji Yamada; Eric Gaussier; Cyrill Goutte
Yahoo! Research	Tong Zhang ; Kishore Papineni

Past Events

Some Sites
NLP Conferences
The Universal Translator
Edinburgh SMT Reading Group
MIT SMT Reading Group
Open Source Projects
Machine Translation Archive
Statistical Machine Translation
Rewrite project (ISI)
Proteus Project (NYU)

Lists

EAMT MT-list

Data

European Parliament Parallel Corpus [Europarl]
Canadian Parliament Parallel Corpus [Handsards]
OPUS - an open source parallel corpus

Tools

Natural Language Software Registry
Pharaoh. A beam search decoder for phrase-based statistical machine translation models.
Carmel Finite-State.
SRI Language Modeling Toolkit.
CMU Statistical Language Modeling Toolkit.
Collins's parser
Dan Bikel's multilingual statistical parsing engine
Charniak's parser
Penn Tools
SVMTool
Freeling
Yamcha
TinySVM
Svmlight
GIZA++ (2003)
MCR WordNet Interface [db scheme]
FrameNet
BLEU script
GTM
NIST
ROUGE
METEOR
WNM (weighted N-gram model)
GenPar software for SMT by Parsing
IQMT (Inside QARLA MT evaluation)
Mood (Modular Object-Oriented Decoder) [http://smtmood.sourceforge.net/]
Moses. A factored phrase-based beam-search decoder for machine translation. [http://sourceforge.net/projects/mosesdecoder/]

Conference Proceedings

MT Summit X 2005
HLT-NAACL 2004
HLT-NAACL 2003
MT Summit IX 2003
ACL Anthology

Companies

Language Weaver
Translendium
Star-Spain
Google [MT demo]
Systran

Selected Publications

Fundamentals of Statistical Machine Translation

Stephen A. Della Pietra, Robert L. Mercer, Peter E Brown, Vincent J. Della Pietra. The Mathematics of Statistical Machine Translation: Parameter Estimation. Computational Linguistics,, 19(2): 263-311, 1993.

Peter F. Brown, John Cocke, Stephen A. Della Pietra, Vincent J. Della Pietra, Fredrick Jelinek, John D. Lafferty, Robert L. Mercer, and Paul S. Roossin. A Statistical Approach to Machine Translation. Computational Linguistics, 16(2):76-85, 1990.

Translation Modeling

Alignment

F.J. Och, H. Ney. A Systematic Comparison of Various Statistical Alignment Models. In Computational Linguistics, Volume 29, Number 1, pp. 19-51, March 2003.
Kevin Knight, Yaser Al-Onaizan, David Purdy, Jan Curin, Michael Jahr, John Lafferty, Dan Melamed, Noah Smith, Franz Josef Och, David Yarowsky. Final Report of Johns Hopkins 1999 Summer Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation. (JHU'99).

Architecture

Abhishek Arun and Philipp Koehn. Online Learning Methods For Discriminative Training of Phrase Based Statistical Machine Translation . (MT Summit XI, 2007).
Percy Liang, Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Dan Klein, and Ben Taskar. An End-to-End Discriminative Approach to Machine Translation. (talk slides). (ACL'06).
Christoph Tillmann and Tong Zhang. A Discriminative Global Training Algorithm for Statistical MT. (ACL'06).
Christoph Tillmann and Tong Zhang. A Localized Prediction for Statistical Machine Translation. (ACL'05).
I. Dan Melamed. Statistical Machine Translation by Parsing. (ACL'04). (CL journal extended version).
Philipp Koehn, Franz Josef Och, and Daniel Marcu. Statistical Phrase-Based Translation. (HLT/NAACL'03).
Dekai WU. Bracketing and aligning words and constituents in parallel text using Stochastic Inversion Transduction Grammars. In Jean VERONIS (editor), Parallel Text Processing: Alignment and Use of Translation Corpora. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ISBN 0-7923-6546-1. Aug 2000.

Word Ordering

Hao Zhang, Liang Huang, Daniel Gildea and Kevin Knight. Synchronous Binarization for Machine Translation. (HLT/NAACL'06).
Liang Huang, Kevin Knight, and Aravind Joshi. Statistical Syntax-Directed Translation with Extended Domain of Locality. (AMTA'06).
Brooke Cowan, Ivona Kucerova, and Michael Collins. A Discriminative Model for Tree-to-Tree Translation. (EMNLP'06).
Daniel Marcu, Wei Wang, Abdessamad Echihabi, and Kevin Knight. SPMT: Statistical Machine Translation with Syntactified Target Language Phrases. (EMNLP'06)

David Chiang. A Hierarchical Phrase-Based Model for Statistical Machine Translation. (ACL'05).

Michael Collins, Philipp Koehn, and Ivona Kucerova. Clause Restructuring for Statistical Machine Translation. (ACL'05).

Dekang Lin. A Path-Based Transfer Model for Machine Translation. (COLING'04).

Hao Zhang and Daniel Gildea. Syntax-Based Alignment: Supervised or Unsupervised?. (COLING'04).

Daniel Gildea. Dependencies vs. Constituents for Tree-Based Alignment. (EMNLP'04).

Michel Galley, Mark Hopkins, Kevin Knight and Daniel Marcu. What's in a translation rule?. (HLT/NAACL'04).

Daniel Gildea. Loosely Tree-Based Alignment for Machine Translation. (ACL'03).

Heidi J. Fox. Phrasal Cohesion and Statistical Machine Translation. (EMNLP'02).

Kenji Yamada and Kevin Knight. A Syntax-based Statistical Translation Model. (ACL'01).

Word Selection

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Discriminative Phrase Selection for Statistical Machine Translation . In Learning Machine Translation. NIPS Workshop Series. MIT Press.

Lucia Specia, Baskaran Sankaran and Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes. n-Best Reranking for the Efficient Integration of Word Sense Disambiguation and Statistical Machine Translation . Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing'08).

Nicolas Stroppa, Antal van den Bosch and Andy Way. Exploiting Source Similarity for SMT using Context-Informed Features . (TMI'07).

Philipp Koehn and Hieu Hoang. Factored Translation Models . (EMNLP'07).

Marine Carpuat and Dekai Wu. Improving Statistical Machine Translation Using Word Sense Disambiguation . (EMNLP'07).
(see also "How Phrase Sense Disambiguation outperforms Word Sense Disambiguation for Statistical Machine Translation" at TMI 2007; "Context-Dependent Phrasal Translation Lexicons for Statistical Machine Translation" at MT Summit XI, 2007; and "Evaluation of Context-Dependent Phrasal Translation Lexicons for Statistical Machine Translation" at LREC 2008).

Yee Seng Chan, Hwee Tou Ng and David Chiang. Word Sense Disambiguation Improves Statistical Machine Translation . (ACL'07).

Srinivas Bangalore, Patrick Haffner and Stephan Kanthak. Statistical Machine Translation through Global Lexical Selection and Sentence Reconstruction . (ACL'07).

Lucia Specia, Mark Stevenson and Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes. Learning Expressive Models for Word Sense Disambiguation . (ACL'07).

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Context-aware Discriminative Phrase Selection for Statistical Machine Translation . (WMT'07).

Marine Carpuat and Dekai Wu. Evaluating the Word Sense Disambiguation Performance of Statistical Machine Translation. (IJCNLP-2005).

D. Vickrey, L. Biewald, M. Teyssier, and D. Koller. Word-Sense Disambiguation for Machine Translation. (HLT/EMNLP'05).

Jesús Giménez, Lluís Márquez and German Rigau. Automatic Translation of WordNet Glosses. (EUROLAN'05 CLKI)

Marine Carpuat and Dekai Wu. Word Sense Disambiguation vs. Statistical Machine Translation. (ACL'05).

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Màrquez. Combining Linguistic Data Views for Phrase-based SMT. (ACL'05 Workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts).

Rafael E. Banchs, Josep M. Crego, Adrià de Gispert, Patrik Lambert and José B. Mariño. Statistical Machine Translation of Euparl Data by using Bilingual N-grams. (ACL'05 Workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts).

Charles Schafer and David Yarowsky. Statistical Machine Translation Using Coercive Two-Level Syntactic Transduction. (EMNLP'03).

Franz Josef Och and Hermann Ney. A Discriminative Training and Maximum Entropy Models for Statistical Machine Translation. (ACL'02).

Daniel Marcu and William Wong. A Phrase-Based, Joint Probability Model for Statistical Machine Translation. (EMNLP'02).

Reranking

Libin Shen, Anoop Sarkar and Franz Och. Discriminative Reranking for Machine Translation. (HLT/NAACL'04).

Franz Josef Och, Daniel Gildea, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Anoop Sarkar, Kenji Yamada, Alex Fraser, Shankar Kumar, Libin Shen, David Smith, Katherine Eng, Viren Jain, Zhen Jin, and Dragomir Radev. A Smorgasbord of Features for Statistical Machine Translation. (NAACL'04).

Franz Josef Och, Daniel Gildea, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Anoop Sarkar, Kenji Yamada, Alex Fraser, Shankar Kumar, Libin Shen, David Smith, Katherine Eng, Viren Jain, Zhen Jin, Dragomir Radev. Final Report of Johns Hopkins 2003 Summer Workshop on Syntax for Statistical Machine Translation. (JHU'03).

Language Modeling

Katrin Kirchhoff and Mei Yang. Improved Language Modeling for Statistical Machine Translation. (ACL'05 Workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts).

Eugene Charniak, Kevin Knight and Kenji Yamada. Syntax-based Language Models for Machine Translation. (SUMMIT-IX'03).

Andreas Stolcke. SRILM - An Extensible Language Modeling Toolkit. (ICSLP'02)

System Development

Patrik Lambert, Jesús Giménez, Marta R. Costa-jussá, Enrique Amigó, Rafael E. Banchs, Lluís Márquez and J.A. R. Fonollosa. Machine Translation System Development based on Human Likeness. (IEEE/ACL'06 WSLT)

Franz Josef Och. Minimum Error Rate Training in Statistical Machine Translation. (ACL'03).

MT evaluation

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Heterogeneous Automatic MT Evaluation Through Non-Parametric Metric Combinations . (IJCNLP'08).

Michael Paul, Andrew Finch and Eiichiro Sumita. Reducing Human Assessments of Machine Translation Quality to Binary Classifiers. (TMI'07).

Joshua Albrecht and Rebecca Hwa. A Re-examination of Machine Learning Approaches for Sentence-Level MT Evaluation . (ACL'07).

Joshua Albrecht and Rebecca Hwa. Regression for Sentence-Level MT Evaluation with Pseudo References . (ACL'07).

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Linguistic Features for Automatic Evaluation of Heterogenous MT Systems . (WMT'07).

Yang Ye, Ming Zhou and Chin-Yew Lin Sentence Level Machine Translation Evaluation as a Ranking Problem: one step aside from BLEU . (WMT'07).

Ding Liu and Daniel Gildea. Source-Language Features and Maximum Correlation Training for Machine Translation Evaluation. (NAACL'07).

{Matthew Snover, Bonnie Dorr, Richard Schwartz, Linnea Micciulla and John Makhoul. A Study of Translation Edit Rate with Targeted Human Annotation. (AMTA'06)

Enrique Amigó, Jesús Giménez, Julio Gonzalo and Lluís Márquez. MT Evaluation: Human-like vs. Human Acceptable. (ACL'06).

Ding Liu and Daniel Gildea. Stochastic Iterative Alignment for Machine Translation Evaluation. (ACL'06).

Chris Callison-Burch and Miles Osborne and Philipp Koehn. Re-evaluating the Role of BLEU in Machine Translation Research. (EACL'06)

Enrique Amigó, Julio Gonzalo, Anselmo Peñas, Felisa Verdejo. QARLA: A Framework for the Evaluation of Text Summarization Systems. (ACL'05).

Ding Liu and Daniel Gildea. Syntactic Features for Evaluation of Machine Translation. (ACL'05 Workshop on Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluation Measures for Machine Translation and/or Summarization).

Satanjeev Banerjee, Alon Lavie. METEOR: An Automatic Metric for MT Evaluation with Improved Correlation with Human Judgments. (ACL'05 Workshop on Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluation Measures for Machine Translation and/or Summarization).

Michael Gamon, Anthony Ave and Martine Smets. Sentence-level MT evaluation without reference translations: Beyond language modeling. (EAMT'05).

Alex Kulesza and Stuart M. Shieber. A learning approach to improving sentence-level MT evaluation. (10th International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation, 2004).

Alon Lavie, Kenji Sagae, and Shyamsundar Jayaraman. The Significance of Recall in Automatic Metrics for MT Evaluation. (AMTA'04).

Philipp Koehn. Statistical Significance Tests for Machine Translation Evaluation. (EMNLP'04).

Chin-Yew Lin and Franz Josef Och. ORANGE: a Method for Evaluating Automatic Evaluation Metrics for Machine Translation. (COLING'04).

Chin-Yew Lin and Franz Josef Och. Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation Quality Using Longest Common Subsequence and Skip-Bigram Statistics. (ACL'04).

Bogdan Babych and Tony Hartley. Extending the BLEU MT Evaluation Method with Frequency Weightings. (ACL'04).

Chris Quirk. Training a Sentence-Level Machine Translation Confidence Metric. (LREC'04).

George Foster, Simona Gandrabur, Cyril Goutte, Erin Fitzgerald, Alberto Sanchis, Nicola Uefng, John Blatz and Alex Kulesza. Confidence estimation for machine translation. Final Report of Johns Hopkins 2003 Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Engineering. (JHU'03)

Joseph P. Turian, Luke Shen, and I. Dan Melamed. Evaluation of Machine Translation and its Evaluation. (MT SUMMIT IX, 2003).

Christopher Culy and Susanne Z. Riehemann. The Limits of N-gram Translation Evaluation Metrics. (MT-SUMMIT-IX, 2003).

Deborah Coughlin. Correlating Automated and Human Assessments of Machine Translation Quality. (MT-SUMMIT-IX, 2003).

I. Dan Melamed, Ryan Green, and Joseph P. Turian. Precision and Recall of Machine Translation. (HLT/NAACL'03).

Chin-Yew Lin and E.H. Hovy. Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation Quality Using N-gram Co-Occurrence Statistics. NIST, 2002.

Kishore Papineni, Salim Roukos, Todd Ward, and Wei-Jing Zhu. Bleu: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. IBM Research Report, RC22176, September 2001.

Yasuhiro Akiba, Kenji Imamura and Eiichiro Sumita. Using Multiple Edit Distances to Automatically Rank Machine Translation Output. (MT Summit VIII, 2001).

Simon Corston-Oliver, Michael Gamon and Chris Brockett. A Machine Learning Approach to the Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation. (ACL'01).

MT decoding

Liang Huang, Hao Zhang and Dan Gildea. Machine Translation as Lexicalized Parsing with Hooks. (IWPT'05)

Philipp Koehn. Pharaoh: a Beam Search Decoder for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation Models. (AMTA'04).

Ulrich Germann. Greedy Decoding for Machine Translation in Almost Linear Time. (HLT/NAACL'03).

Kenji Yamada and Kevin Knight. A Decoder for Syntax-based Statistical MT. (ACL'02).

Ulrich Germann and Michael Jahr and Kevin Knight and Daniel Marcu and Kenji Yamada. Fast decoding and optimal decoding for machine translation. (ACL'01)

Hybrid MT (EBMT/SMT)

Declan Groves and Andy Way. 2005. Hybrid Example-Based SMT: the Best of Both Worlds?. (ACL'05 Workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts).

Phd Theses

Jesús Giménez. Empirical Machine Translation and its Evaluation, PhD thesis, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2008.

Philipp Koehn. Noun Phrase Translation, PhD thesis, University of Southern California, 2003.

Kenji Yamada. A Syntax-based Translation Model, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Southern California, 2002.

Franz Josef Och. Statistical Machine Translation: From Single-Word Models to Alignment Templates, PhD thesis, RWTH Aachen, Germany, 2002.

MT Introductory Material

Dorr, Bonnie J. Machine Translation Divergences: A Formal Description and Proposed Solution (.pdf). In Computational Linguistics, 20:4, pp. 597-633, 1994.

Kevin Knight. A Statistical MT Tutorial Workbook. (unpublished, August 1999)

D.J. Arnold, Lorna Balkan, Siety Meijer, R.Lee Humphreys and Louisa Sadler. Machine Translation: an Introductory Guide, Blackwells-NCC, London, 1994, ISBN: 1855542-17x.

Kenneth W. Church and Eduard H. Hovy. Good Applications for Crummy Machine Translation. In Machine Translation, 8:4, pp. 239-258, 1993.

History of MT

John Hutchins (website)

(last updated July 20, 2008)

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