Learning to translate with products of novices: a suite of open-ended challenge problems for teaching MT

Adam Lopez, Matt Post, Chris Callison-Burch, Jonathan Weese, Juri Ganitkevitch, Narges Ahmidi, Olivia Buzek, Leah Hanson, Beenish Jamil, Matthias Lee, Ya-Ting Lin, Henry Pao, Fatima Rivera, Leili Shahriyari, Debu Sinha, Adam Teichert, Stephen Wampler, Michael Weinberger, Daguang Xu, Lin Yang, Shang Zhao

[How to correct problems with metadata yourself]

Abstract
Machine translation (MT) draws from several different disciplines, making it a complex subject to teach. There are excellent pedagogical texts, but problems in MT and current algorithms for solving them are best learned by doing. As a centerpiece of our MT course, we devised a series of open-ended challenges for students in which the goal was to improve performance on carefully constrained instances of four key MT tasks: alignment, decoding, evaluation, and reranking. Students brought a diverse set of techniques to the problems, including some novel solutions which performed remarkably well. A surprising and exciting outcome was that student solutions or their combinations fared competitively on some tasks, demonstrating that even newcomers to the field can help improve the state-of-the-art on hard NLP problems while simultaneously learning a great deal. The problems, baseline code, and results are freely available.
Anthology ID:
Q13-1014
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 1
Month:
Year:
2013
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Dekang Lin, Michael Collins
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
165–178
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q13-1014
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00218
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Adam Lopez, Matt Post, Chris Callison-Burch, Jonathan Weese, Juri Ganitkevitch, Narges Ahmidi, Olivia Buzek, Leah Hanson, Beenish Jamil, Matthias Lee, Ya-Ting Lin, Henry Pao, Fatima Rivera, Leili Shahriyari, Debu Sinha, Adam Teichert, Stephen Wampler, Michael Weinberger, Daguang Xu, et al.. 2013. Learning to translate with products of novices: a suite of open-ended challenge problems for teaching MT. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1:165–178.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to translate with products of novices: a suite of open-ended challenge problems for teaching MT (Lopez et al., TACL 2013)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/Q13-1014.pdf
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