Abstract
Orthographic similarities across languages provide a strong signal for unsupervised probabilistic transduction (decipherment) for closely related language pairs. The existing decipherment models, however, are not well suited for exploiting these orthographic similarities. We propose a log-linear model with latent variables that incorporates orthographic similarity features. Maximum likelihood training is computationally expensive for the proposed log-linear model. To address this challenge, we perform approximate inference via Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling and contrastive divergence. Our results show that the proposed log-linear model with contrastive divergence outperforms the existing generative decipherment models by exploiting the orthographic features. The model both scales to large vocabularies and preserves accuracy in low- and no-resource contexts.- Anthology ID:
 - J18-3006
 - Volume:
 - Computational Linguistics, Volume 44, Issue 3 - September 2018
 - Month:
 - September
 - Year:
 - 2018
 - Address:
 - Cambridge, MA
 - Venue:
 - CL
 - SIG:
 - Publisher:
 - MIT Press
 - Note:
 - Pages:
 - 525–546
 - Language:
 - URL:
 - https://aclanthology.org/J18-3006
 - DOI:
 - 10.1162/coli_a_00326
 - Cite (ACL):
 - Iftekhar Naim, Parker Riley, and Daniel Gildea. 2018. Feature-Based Decipherment for Machine Translation. Computational Linguistics, 44(3):525–546.
 - Cite (Informal):
 - Feature-Based Decipherment for Machine Translation (Naim et al., CL 2018)
 - PDF:
 - https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/J18-3006.pdf