Xiaojun Zhang


2020

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Proceedings of the Second International Workshop of Discourse Processing
Qun Liu | Deyi Xiong | Shili Ge | Xiaojun Zhang
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop of Discourse Processing

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A Review of Discourse-level Machine Translation
Xiaojun Zhang
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop of Discourse Processing

Machine translation (MT) models usually translate a text at sentence level by considering isolated sentences, which is based on a strict assumption that the sentences in a text are independent of one another. However, the fact is that the texts at discourse level have properties going beyond individual sentences. These properties reveal texts in the frequency and distribution of words, word senses, referential forms and syntactic structures. Dissregarding dependencies across sentences will harm translation quality especially in terms of coherence, cohesion, and consistency. To solve these problems, several approaches have previously been investigated for conventional statistical machine translation (SMT). With the fast growth of neural machine translation (NMT), discourse-level NMT has drawn increasing attention from researchers. In this work, we review major works on addressing discourse related problems for both SMT and NMT models with a survey of recent trends in the fields.

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Comparison of the effects of attention mechanism on translation tasks of different lengths of ambiguous words
Yue Hu | Jiahao Qin | Zemeiqi Chen | Jingshi Zhou | Xiaojun Zhang
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop of Discourse Processing

In recent years, attention mechanism has been widely used in various neural machine translation tasks based on encoder decoder. This paper focuses on the performance of encoder decoder attention mechanism in word sense disambiguation task with different text length, trying to find out the influence of context marker on attention mechanism in word sense disambiguation task. We hypothesize that attention mechanisms have similar performance when translating texts of different lengths. Our conclusion is that the alignment effect of attention mechanism is magnified in short text translation tasks with ambiguous nouns, while the effect of attention mechanism is far less than expected in long-text tasks, which means that attention mechanism is not the main mechanism for NMT model to feed WSD to integrate context information. This may mean that attention mechanism pays more attention to ambiguous nouns than context markers. The experimental results show that with the increase of text length, the performance of NMT model using attention mechanism will gradually decline.

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Corpora for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation
Siyou Liu | Xiaojun Zhang
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Instead of translating sentences in isolation, document-level machine translation aims to capture discourse dependencies across sentences by considering a document as a whole. In recent years, there have been more interests in modelling larger context for the state-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT). Although various document-level NMT models have shown significant improvements, there nonetheless exist three main problems: 1) compared with sentence-level translation tasks, the data for training robust document-level models are relatively low-resourced; 2) experiments in previous work are conducted on their own datasets which vary in size, domain and language; 3) proposed approaches are implemented on distinct NMT architectures such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and self-attention networks (SANs). In this paper, we aims to alleviate the low-resource and under-universality problems for document-level NMT. First, we collect a large number of existing document-level corpora, which covers 7 language pairs and 6 domains. In order to address resource sparsity, we construct a novel document parallel corpus in Chinese-Portuguese, which is a non-English-centred and low-resourced language pair. Besides, we implement and evaluate the commonly-cited document-level method on top of the advanced Transformer model with universal settings. Finally, we not only demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of document-level NMT, but also release the preprocessed data, source code and trained models for comparison and reproducibility.

2016

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Automatic Construction of Discourse Corpora for Dialogue Translation
Longyue Wang | Xiaojun Zhang | Zhaopeng Tu | Andy Way | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to automatically construct parallel discourse corpus for dialogue machine translation. Firstly, the parallel subtitle data and its corresponding monolingual movie script data are crawled and collected from Internet. Then tags such as speaker and discourse boundary from the script data are projected to its subtitle data via an information retrieval approach in order to map monolingual discourse to bilingual texts. We not only evaluate the mapping results, but also integrate speaker information into the translation. Experiments show our proposed method can achieve 81.79% and 98.64% accuracy on speaker and dialogue boundary annotation, and speaker-based language model adaptation can obtain around 0.5 BLEU points improvement in translation qualities. Finally, we publicly release around 100K parallel discourse data with manual speaker and dialogue boundary annotation.

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A Novel Approach to Dropped Pronoun Translation
Longyue Wang | Zhaopeng Tu | Xiaojun Zhang | Hang Li | Andy Way | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2015

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The DCU Discourse Parser for Connective, Argument Identification and Explicit Sense Classification
Longyue Wang | Chris Hokamp | Tsuyoshi Okita | Xiaojun Zhang | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning - Shared Task

2011

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DFKI Hybrid Machine Translation System for WMT 2011 - On the Integration of SMT and RBMT
Jia Xu | Hans Uszkoreit | Casey Kennington | David Vilar | Xiaojun Zhang
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation