Example-Based Machine Translation (EBMT) systems have typically operated on individual sentences without taking into account prior context. By adding a simple reweighting of retrieved fragments of training examples on the basis of whether the previous translation retrieved any fragments from examples within a small window of the current instance, translation performance is improved. A further improvement is seen by performing a similar reweighting when another fragment of the current input sentence was retrieved from the same training example. Together, a simple, straightforward implementation of these two factors results in an improvement on the order of 1.0–1.6% in the BLEU metric across multiple data sets in multiple languages.

Corpus-based MT systems that analyse and generalise texts beyond the surface forms of words require generation tools to re-generate the various internal representations into valid target language (TL) sentences. While the generation of word-forms from lemmas is probably the last step in every text generation process at its very bottom end, token-generation cannot be accomplished without structural and morpho-syntactic knowledge of the sentence to be generated. As in many other MT models, this knowledge is composed of a target language model and a bag of information transferred from the source language. In this paper we establish an abstracted, linguistically informed, target language model. We use a tagger, a lemmatiser and a parser to infer a template grammar from the TL corpus. Given a linguistically informed TL model, the aim is to see what need be provided from the transfer module for generation. During computation of the template grammar, we simultaneously build up for each TL sentence the content of the bag such that the sentence can be deterministically reproduced. In this way we control the completeness of the approach and will have an idea of what pieces of information we need to code in the TL bag.

This paper presents a generalization technique that induces translation templates from given translation examples by replacing differing parts in these examples with typed variables. Since the type of each variable is also inferred during the learning process, each induced template is associated with a set of type constraints. The type constraints that are associated with a translation template restrict the usage of that translation template in certain contexts in order to avoid some of wrong translations. The types of variables are induced using the type lattices designed for both source language and target language. The proposed generalization technique has been implemented as a part of an EBMT system.

The METIS-II project is an example-based machine translation system, making use of minimal resources and tools for both source and target language, making use of a target-language (TL) corpus, but not of any parallel corpora. In the current paper, we discuss the view of our team on the general philosophy and outline of the METIS-II system.

We describe our use of RSS news feeds to quickly assemble a parallel English-Japanese corpus. Our method is simpler than other web mining approaches, and it produces a parallel corpus whose quality, quantity, and rate of growth are stable and predictable.

The example-based approach to MT is becoming increasingly popular. However, such is the variety of techniques and methods used that it is difficult to discern the overall conception of what example-based machine translation (EBMT) is and/or what its practitioners conceive it to be. Although definitions of MT systems are notoriously complex, an attempt is made to define EBMT in contrast to other MT architectures (RBMT and SMT).

We present a study we conducted to build a repository storing associations between simple dependency treelets in a source language and their corresponding phrases in a target language. To assess the impact of this resource in EBMT, we used the repository to compute coverage statistics on a test bitext and on a n-best list of translation candidates produced by a standard phrase-based decoder.

We designed, implemented and assessed an EBMT system that can be dubbed the “purest ever built”: it strictly does not make any use of variables, templates or training, does not have any explicit transfer component, and does not require any preprocessing of the aligned examples. It uses a specific operation, namely proportional analogy, that implicitly neutralises divergences between languages and captures lexical and syntactical variations along the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes without explicitly decomposing sentences into fragments. In an experiment with a test set of 510 input sentences and an unprocessed corpus of almost 160,000 aligned sentences in Japanese and English, we obtained BLEU, NIST and mWER scores of 0.53, 8.53 and 0.39 respectively, well above a baseline simulating a translation memory.

In the present article, a hybrid approach is proposed for implementing a machine translation system using a large monolingual corpus coupled with a bilingual lexicon and basic NLP tools. In the first phase of the METIS system, a source language (SL) sentence, after being tagged, lemmatised and translated by a flat lemma-to-lemma lexicon, was matched against a tagged and lemmatised target language (TL) corpus using a pattern matching algorithm. In the second phase, translations are generated by combining sub-sentential structures. In this paper, the main features of the second phase are discussed while the system architecture and the corresponding translation approach are presented. The proposed methodology is illustrated with examples of the translation process.

We describe a novel approach to machine translation that combines the strengths of the two leading corpus-based approaches: Phrasal SMT and EBMT. We use a syntactically informed decoder and reordering model based on the source dependency tree, in combination with conventional SMT models to incorporate the power of phrasal SMT with the linguistic generality available in a parser. We show that this approach significantly outperforms a leading string-based Phrasal SMT decoder and an EBMT system. We present results from two radically different language pairs, and investigate the sensitivity of this approach to parse quality by using two distinct parsers and oracle experiments. We also validate our automated BLEU scores with a small human evaluation.

Users of sign languages are often forced to use a language in which they have reduced competence simply because documentation in their preferred format is not available. While some research exists on translating between natural and sign languages, we present here what we believe to be the first attempt to tackle this problem using an example-based (EBMT) approach. Having obtained a set of English–Dutch Sign Language examples, we employ an approach to EBMT using the ‘Marker Hypothesis’ (Green, 1979), analogous to the successful system of (Way & Gough, 2003), (Gough & Way, 2004a) and (Gough & Way, 2004b). In a set of experiments, we show that encouragingly good translation quality may be obtained using such an approach.

This paper proposes a method for integrating example-based and rule-based machine translation systems with statistical methods. It extends a greedy decoder for statistical machine translation (SMT), which searches for an optimal translation by using SMT models starting from a decoder seed, i.e., the source language input paired with an initial translation hypothesis. In order to reduce local optima problems inherent in the search, the outputs generated by multiple translation engines, such as rule-based (RBMT) and example-based (EBMT) systems, are utilized as the initial translation hypotheses. This method outperforms conventional greedy decoding approaches using initial translation hypotheses based on translation examples retrieved from a parallel text corpus. However, the decoding of multiple initial translation hypotheses is computationally expensive. This paper proposes a method to select a single initial translation hypothesis before decoding based on a machine learning approach that judges the appropriateness of multiple initial translation hypotheses and selects the most confident one for decoding. Our approach is evaluated for the translation of dialogues in the travel domain, and the results show that it drastically reduces computational costs without a loss in translation quality.

The paper reports an Example based Machine Translation System for translating News Headlines from English to Bengali. The input headline is initially searched in the Direct Example Base. If it cannot be found, the input headline is tagged and the tagged headline is searched in the Generalized Tagged Example Base. If a match is obtained, the tagged headline in Bengali is retrieved from the example base, the output Bengali headline is generated after retrieving the Bengali equivalents of the English words from appropriate dictionaries and then applying relevant synthesis rules for generating the Bengali surface level words. If some named entities and acronyms are not present in the dictionary, transliteration scheme is applied for obtaining the Bengali equivalent. If a match is not found, the tagged input headline is analysed to identify the constituent phrase(s). The target translation is generated using English-Bengali phrasal example base, appropriate dictionaries and a set of heuristics for Bengali phrase reordering. If the headline still cannot be translated using example base strategy, a heuristic translation strategy will be applied. Any new input tagged headline along with its translation by the user will be inserted in the tagged Example base after generalization.

For the METIS-II project (IST, start: 10-2004 – end: 09-2007) we are working on an example-based machine translation system, making use of minimal resources and tools for both source and target language, i.e. making use of a target language corpus, but not of any parallel corpora. In the current paper, we present the results of the first experiments with our approach (CCL) within the METIS consortium : the translation of noun phrases from Dutch to English, using the British National Corpus as a target language corpus. Future research is planned along similar lines for the sentence as is presented here for the noun phrase.