The problem of sequence labelling in language understanding would benefit from approaches inspired by semantic priming phenomena. We propose that an attention-based RNN architecture can be used to simulate semantic priming for sequence labelling. Specifically, we employ pre-trained word embeddings to characterize the semantic relationship between utterances and labels. We validate the approach using varying sizes of the ATIS and MEDIA datasets, and show up to 1.4-1.9% improvement in F1 score. The developed framework can enable more explainable and generalizable spoken language understanding systems.

Transliteration is defined as phonetic translation of names across languages. Transliteration of Named Entities (NEs) is necessary in many applications, such as machine translation, corpus alignment, cross-language IR, information extraction and automatic lexicon acquisition. All such systems call for high-performance transliteration, which is the focus of shared task in the NEWS 2018 workshop. The objective of the shared task is to promote machine transliteration research by providing a common benchmarking platform for the community to evaluate the state-of-the-art technologies.

This report presents the results from the Named Entity Transliteration Shared Task conducted as part of The Seventh Named Entities Workshop (NEWS 2018) held at ACL 2018 in Melbourne, Australia. Similar to previous editions of NEWS, the Shared Task featured 19 tasks on proper name transliteration, including 13 different languages and two different Japanese scripts. A total of 6 teams from 8 different institutions participated in the evaluation, submitting 424 runs, involving different transliteration methodologies. Four performance metrics were used to report the evaluation results. The NEWS shared task on machine transliteration has successfully achieved its objectives by providing a common ground for the research community to conduct comparative evaluations of state-of-the-art technologies that will benefit the future research and development in this area.

The mathematical metaphor offered by the geometric concept of distance in vector spaces with respect to semantics and meaning has been proven to be useful in many monolingual natural language processing applications. There is also some recent and strong evidence that this paradigm can also be useful in the cross-language setting. In this tutorial, we present and discuss some of the most recent advances on exploiting the vector space model paradigm in specific cross-language natural language processing applications, along with a comprehensive review of the theoretical background behind them.First, the tutorial introduces some fundamental concepts of distributional semantics and vector space models. More specifically, the concepts of distributional hypothesis and term-document matrices are revised, followed by a brief discussion on linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques and their implications to the parallel distributed approach to semantic cognition. Next, some classical examples of using vector space models in monolingual natural language processing applications are presented. Specific examples in the areas of information retrieval, related term identification and semantic compositionality are described.Then, the tutorial focuses its attention on the use of the vector space model paradigm in cross-language applications. To this end, some recent examples are presented and discussed in detail, addressing the specific problems of cross-language information retrieval, cross-language sentence matching, and machine translation. Some of the most recent developments in the area of Neural Machine Translation are also discussed.Finally, the tutorial concludes with a discussion about current and future research problems related to the use of vector space models in cross-language settings. Future avenues for scientific research are described, with major emphasis on the extension from vector and matrix representations to tensors, as well as the problem of encoding word position information into the vector-based representations.

This paper describes the UPC-BMIC-VMU participation in the IWSLT 2010 evaluation campaign. The SMT system is a standard phrase-based enriched with novel segmentations. These novel segmentations are computed using statistical measures such as Log-likelihood, T-score, Chi-squared, Dice, Mutual Information or Gravity-Counts. The analysis of translation results allows to divide measures into three groups. First, Log-likelihood, Chi-squared and T-score tend to combine high frequency words and collocation segments are very short. They improve the SMT system by adding new translation units. Second, Mutual Information and Dice tend to combine low frequency words and collocation segments are short. They improve the SMT system by smoothing the translation units. And third, GravityCounts tends to combine high and low frequency words and collocation segments are long. However, in this case, the SMT system is not improved. Thus, the road-map for translation system improvement is to introduce new phrases with either low frequency or high frequency words. It is hard to introduce new phrases with low and high frequency words in order to improve translation quality. Experimental results are reported in the French-to-English IWSLT 2010 evaluation where our system was ranked 3rd out of nine systems.

This paper describes the Barcelona Media SMT system in the IWSLT 2009 evaluation campaign. The Barcelona Media system is an statistical phrase-based system enriched with source context information. Adding source context in an SMT system is interesting to enhance the translation in order to solve lexical and structural choice errors. The novel technique uses a similarity metric among each test sentence and each training sentence. First experimental results of this technique are reported in the Arabic and Chinese Basic Traveling Expression Corpus (BTEC) task. Although working in a single domain, there are ambiguities in SMT translation units and slight improvements in BLEU are shown in both tasks (Zh2En and Ar2En).

This paper gives a description of the statistical machine translation (SMT) systems developed at the TALP Research Center of the UPC (Universitat Polite`cnica de Catalunya) for our participation in the IWSLT’08 evaluation campaign. We present Ngram-based (TALPtuples) and phrase-based (TALPphrases) SMT systems. The paper explains the 2008 systems’ architecture and outlines translation schemes we have used, mainly focusing on the new techniques that are challenged to improve speech-to-speech translation quality. The novelties we have introduced are: improved reordering method, linear combination of translation and reordering models and new technique dealing with punctuation marks insertion for a phrase-based SMT system. This year we focus on the Arabic-English, Chinese-Spanish and pivot Chinese-(English)-Spanish translation tasks.

This paper describes TALPtuples, the 2007 N-gram-based statistical machine translation system developed at the TALP Research Center of the UPC (Universitat Polite`cnica de Catalunya) in Barcelona. Emphasis is put on improvements and extensions of the system of previous years. Mainly, these include optimizing alignment parameters in function of translation metric scores and rescoring with a neural network language model. Results on two translation directions are reported, namely from Arabic and Chinese into English, thoroughly explaining all language-related preprocessing and translation schemes.

This paper describes an acceptance test procedure for evaluating a spoken language translation system between Catalan and Spanish. The procedure consists of two independent tests. The first test was an utterance-oriented evaluation for determining how the use of speech benefits communication. This test allowed for comparing relative performance of the different system components, explicitly: source text to target text, source text to target speech, source speech to target text, and source speech to target speech. The second test was a task-oriented experiment for evaluating if users could achieve some predefined goals for a given task with the state of the technology. Eight subjects familiar with the technology and four subjects not familiar with the technology participated in the tests. From the results we can conclude that state of technology is getting closer to provide effective speech-to-speech translation systems but there is still lot of work to be done in this area. No significant differences in performance between users that are familiar with the technology and users that are not familiar with the technology were evidenced. This constitutes, as far as we know, the first evaluation of a Spoken Translation System that considers performance at both, the utterance level and the task level.

This paper describes a statistical machine translation system that uses a translation model which is based on bilingual n-grams. When this translation model is log-linearly combined with four specific feature functions, state of the art translations are achieved for Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish translation tasks. Some specific results obtained for the EPPS (European Parliament Plenary Sessions) data are presented and discussed. Finally, future research issues are depicted.

This paper presents a strategy for detecting and using multi-word expressions in Statistical Machine Translation. Performance of the proposed strategy is evaluated in terms of alignment quality as well as translation accuracy. Evaluations are performed by using the Verbmobil corpus. Results from translation tasks from English-to-Spanish and from Spanish-to-English are presented and discussed.