Graph Algorithms for Multiparallel Word Alignment
Ayyoob Imani, Masoud Jalili Sabet, Lutfi Kerem Senel, Philipp Dufter, François Yvon, Hinrich Schütze
Abstract
With the advent of end-to-end deep learning approaches in machine translation, interest in word alignments initially decreased; however, they have again become a focus of research more recently. Alignments are useful for typological research, transferring formatting like markup to translated texts, and can be used in the decoding of machine translation systems. At the same time, massively multilingual processing is becoming an important NLP scenario, and pretrained language and machine translation models that are truly multilingual are proposed. However, most alignment algorithms rely on bitexts only and do not leverage the fact that many parallel corpora are multiparallel. In this work, we exploit the multiparallelity of corpora by representing an initial set of bilingual alignments as a graph and then predicting additional edges in the graph. We present two graph algorithms for edge prediction: one inspired by recommender systems and one based on network link prediction. Our experimental results show absolute improvements in F1 of up to 28% over the baseline bilingual word aligner in different datasets.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.665
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Editors:
- Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 8457–8469
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.665
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.665
- Cite (ACL):
- Ayyoob Imani, Masoud Jalili Sabet, Lutfi Kerem Senel, Philipp Dufter, François Yvon, and Hinrich Schütze. 2021. Graph Algorithms for Multiparallel Word Alignment. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8457–8469, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Graph Algorithms for Multiparallel Word Alignment (Imani et al., EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2021.emnlp-main.665.pdf
- Code
- cisnlp/graph-align