We test a series of techniques to predict punctuation and its effect on machine translation (MT) quality. Several techniques for punctuation prediction are compared: language modeling techniques, such as n-grams and long shortterm memories (LSTM), sequence labeling LSTMs (unidirectional and bidirectional), and monolingual phrase-based, hierarchical and neural MT. For actual translation, phrase-based, hierarchical and neural MT are investigated. We observe that for punctuation prediction, phrase-based statistical MT and neural MT reach similar results, and are best used as a preprocessing step which is followed by neural MT to perform the actual translation. Implicit punctuation insertion by a dedicated neural MT system, trained on unpunctuated source and punctuated target, yields similar results.

We present the highlights of the now finished 4-year SCATE project. It was completed in February 2018 and funded by the Flemish Government IWT-SBO, project No. 130041.1

We present a Character-Word Long Short-Term Memory Language Model which both reduces the perplexity with respect to a baseline word-level language model and reduces the number of parameters of the model. Character information can reveal structural (dis)similarities between words and can even be used when a word is out-of-vocabulary, thus improving the modeling of infrequent and unknown words. By concatenating word and character embeddings, we achieve up to 2.77% relative improvement on English compared to a baseline model with a similar amount of parameters and 4.57% on Dutch. Moreover, we also outperform baseline word-level models with a larger number of parameters.

We present Sparse Non-negative Matrix (SNM) estimation, a novel probability estimation technique for language modeling that can efficiently incorporate arbitrary features. We evaluate SNM language models on two corpora: the One Billion Word Benchmark and a subset of the LDC English Gigaword corpus. Results show that SNM language models trained with n-gram features are a close match for the well-established Kneser-Ney models. The addition of skip-gram features yields a model that is in the same league as the state-of-the-art recurrent neural network language models, as well as complementary: combining the two modeling techniques yields the best known result on the One Billion Word Benchmark. On the Gigaword corpus further improvements are observed using features that cross sentence boundaries. The computational advantages of SNM estimation over both maximum entropy and neural network estimation are probably its main strength, promising an approach that has large flexibility in combining arbitrary features and yet scales gracefully to large amounts of data.

In this paper we present SCALE, a new Python toolkit that contains two extensions to n-gram language models. The first extension is a novel technique to model compound words called Semantic Head Mapping (SHM). The second extension, Bag-of-Words Language Modeling (BagLM), bundles popular models such as Latent Semantic Analysis and Continuous Skip-grams. Both extensions scale to large data and allow the integration into first-pass ASR decoding. The toolkit is open source, includes working examples and can be found on http://github.com/jorispelemans/scale.

In this paper we present 3 applications in the domain of Automatic Speech Recognition for Dutch, all of which are developed using our in-house speech recognition toolkit SPRAAK. The speech-to-text transcriber is a large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer, optimized for Southern Dutch. It is capable to select components and adjust parameters on the fly, based on the observed conditions in the audio and was recently extended with the capability of adding new words to the lexicon. The grapheme-to-phoneme converter generates possible pronunciations for Dutch words, based on lexicon lookup and linguistic rules. The speech-text alignment system takes audio and text as input and constructs a time aligned output where every word receives exact begin and end times. All three of the applications (and others) are freely available, after registration, as a web application on http://www.spraak.org/webservice/ and in addition, can be accessed as a web service in automated tools.