ROUGE is a widely used evaluation metric in text summarization. However, it is not suitable for the evaluation of abstractive summarization systems as it relies on lexical overlap between the gold standard and the generated summaries. This limitation becomes more apparent for agglutinative languages with very large vocabularies and high type/token ratios. In this paper, we present semantic similarity models for Turkish and apply them as evaluation metrics for an abstractive summarization task. To achieve this, we translated the English STSb dataset into Turkish and presented the first semantic textual similarity dataset for Turkish as well. We showed that our best similarity models have better alignment with average human judgments compared to ROUGE in both Pearson and Spearman correlations.

Arabic writing is typically underspecified for short vowels and other markups, referred to as diacritics. In addition to the lexical ambiguity exhibited in most languages, the lack of diacritics in written Arabic adds another layer of ambiguity which is an artifact of the orthography. In this paper, we present the details of three annotation experimental conditions designed to study the impact of automatic ambiguity detection, on annotation speed and quality in a large scale annotation project.

We present our guidelines and annotation procedure to create a human corrected machine translated post-edited corpus for the Modern Standard Arabic. Our overarching goal is to use the annotated corpus to develop automatic machine translation post-editing systems for Arabic that can be used to help accelerate the human revision process of translated texts. The creation of any manually annotated corpus usually presents many challenges. In order to address these challenges, we created comprehensive and simplified annotation guidelines which were used by a team of five annotators and one lead annotator. In order to ensure a high annotation agreement between the annotators, multiple training sessions were held and regular inter-annotator agreement measures were performed to check the annotation quality. The created corpus of manual post-edited translations of English to Arabic articles is the largest to date for this language pair.

This paper presents the annotation guidelines developed as part of an effort to create a large scale manually diacritized corpus for various Arabic text genres. The target size of the annotated corpus is 2 million words. We summarize the guidelines and describe issues encountered during the training of the annotators. We also discuss the challenges posed by the complexity of the Arabic language and how they are addressed. Finally, we present the diacritization annotation procedure and detail the quality of the resulting annotations.

The daily spoken variety of Arabic is often termed the colloquial or dialect form of Arabic. There are many Arabic dialects across the Arab World and within other Arabic speaking communities. These dialects vary widely from region to region and to a lesser extent from city to city in each region. The dialects are not standardized, they are not taught, and they do not have official status. However they are the primary vehicles of communication (face-to-face and recently, online) and have a large presence in the arts as well. In this paper, we present the first multidialectal Arabic parallel corpus, a collection of 2,000 sentences in Standard Arabic, Egyptian, Tunisian, Jordanian, Palestinian and Syrian Arabic, in addition to English. Such parallel data does not exist naturally, which makes this corpus a very valuable resource that has many potential applications such as Arabic dialect identification and machine translation.

This paper presents YOUDACC, an automatically annotated large-scale multi-dialectal Arabic corpus collected from user comments on Youtube videos. Our corpus covers different groups of dialects: Egyptian (EG), Gulf (GU), Iraqi (IQ), Maghrebi (MG) and Levantine (LV). We perform an empirical analysis on the crawled corpus and demonstrate that our location-based proposed method is effective for the task of dialect labeling.

We present annotation guidelines and a web-based annotation framework developed as part of an effort to create a manually annotated Arabic corpus of errors and corrections for various text types. Such a corpus will be invaluable for developing Arabic error correction tools, both for training models and as a gold standard for evaluating error correction algorithms. We summarize the guidelines we created. We also describe issues encountered during the training of the annotators, as well as problems that are specific to the Arabic language that arose during the annotation process. Finally, we present the annotation tool that was developed as part of this project, the annotation pipeline, and the quality of the resulting annotations.

We present an annotation and morphological segmentation scheme for Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) in which we annotate user-generated content that significantly deviates from the orthographic and grammatical rules of Modern Standard Arabic and thus cannot be processed by the commonly used MSA tools. Using a per letter classification scheme in which each letter is classified as either a segment boundary or not, and using a memory-based classifier, with only word-internal context, prove effective and achieve a 92% exact match accuracy at the word level. The well-known MADA system achieves 81% while the per letter classification scheme using the ATB achieves 82%. Error analysis shows that the major problem is that of character ambiguity since the ECA orthography overloads the characters which would otherwise be more specific in MSA, like the differences between y (ي) and Y (ى) and A (ا) , > ( أ), and < (إ) which are collapsed to y (ي) and A (ا) respectively or even totally confused and interchangeable. While normalization helps alleviate orthographic inconsistencies, it aggravates the problem of ambiguity.

We present a tool, BLEU+, which implements various extension to BLEU computation to allow for a better understanding of the translation performance, especially for morphologically complex languages. BLEU+ takes into account both “closeness” in morphological structure, “closeness” of the root words in the WordNet hierarchy while comparing tokens in the candidate and reference sentence. In addition to gauging performance at a finer level of granularity, BLEU+ also allows the computation of various upper bound oracle scores: comparing all tokens considering only the roots allows us to get an upper bound when all errors due to morphological structure are fixed, while comparing tokens in an error-tolerant way considering minor morpheme edit operations, allows us to get a (more realistic) upper bound when tokens that differ in morpheme insertions/deletions and substitutions are fixed. We use BLEU+ in the fine-grained evaluation of the output of our English-to-Turkish statistical MT system.

This paper describes the integration of a Turkish generation system with the KANT knowledge-based machine translation system to produce a prototype English-Turkish interlingua-based machine translation system. These two independently constructed systems were successfully integrated within a period of two months, through development of a module which maps KANT interlingua expressions to Turkish syntactic structures. The combined system is able to translate completely and correctly 44 of 52 benchmark sentences in the domain of broadcast news captions. This study is the first known application of knowledge-based machine translation from English to Turkish, and our initial results show promise for future development.

Error-tolerant recognition enables the recognition of strings that deviate slightly from any string in the regular set recognized by the underlying finite state recognizer. In the context of natural language processing, it has applications in error-tolerant morphological analysis, and spelling correction. After a description of the concepts and algorithms involved, we give examples from these two applications: In morphological analysis, error-tolerant recognition allows misspelled input word forms to be corrected, and morphologically analyzed concurrently. The algorithm can be applied to the moiphological analysis of any language whose morphology is fully captured by a single (and possibly very large) finite state transducer, regardless of the word formation processes (such as agglutination or productive compounding) and morphographemic phenomena involved. We present an application to error tolerant analysis of agglutinative morphology of Turkish words. In spelling correction, error-tolerant recognition can be used to enumerate correct candidate forms from a given misspelled string within a certain edit distance. It can be applied to any language whose morphology is fully described by a finite state transducer, or with a word list comprising all inflected forms with very large word lists of root and inflected forms (some containing well over 200,000 forms), generating all candidate solutions within 10 to 45 milliseconds (with edit distance 1) on a SparcStation 10/41. For spelling correction in Turkish, error-tolerant recognition operating with a (circular) recognizer of Turkish words (with about 29,000 states and 119,000 transitions) can generate all candidate words in less than 20 milliseconds (with edit distance 1). Spelling correction using a recognizer constructed from a large word German list that simulates compounding, also indicates that the approach is applicable in such cases.