This paper surveys the first, three-year phase of a project at the National Research Council of Canada that is developing software to assist Indigenous communities in Canada in preserving their languages and extending their use. The project aimed to work within the empowerment paradigm, where collaboration with communities and fulfillment of their goals is central. Since many of the technologies we developed were in response to community needs, the project ended up as a collection of diverse subprojects, including the creation of a sophisticated framework for building verb conjugators for highly inflectional polysynthetic languages (such as Kanyen’kéha, in the Iroquoian language family), release of what is probably the largest available corpus of sentences in a polysynthetic language (Inuktut) aligned with English sentences and experiments with machine translation (MT) systems trained on this corpus, free online services based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) for easing the transcription bottleneck for recordings of speech in Indigenous languages (and other languages), software for implementing text prediction and read-along audiobooks for Indigenous languages, and several other subprojects.

The Inuktitut language, a member of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan language family, is spoken across Arctic Canada and noted for its morphological complexity. It is an official language of two territories, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, and has recognition in additional regions. This paper describes a newly released sentence-aligned Inuktitut–English corpus based on the proceedings of the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut, covering sessions from April 1999 to June 2017. With approximately 1.3 million aligned sentence pairs, this is, to our knowledge, the largest parallel corpus of a polysynthetic language or an Indigenous language of the Americas released to date. The paper describes the alignment methodology used, the evaluation of the alignments, and preliminary experiments on statistical and neural machine translation (SMT and NMT) between Inuktitut and English, in both directions.

In this article, we discuss which text, speech, and image technologies have been developed, and would be feasible to develop, for the approximately 60 Indigenous languages spoken in Canada. In particular, we concentrate on technologies that may be feasible to develop for most or all of these languages, not just those that may be feasible for the few most-resourced of these. We assess past achievements and consider future horizons for Indigenous language transliteration, text prediction, spell-checking, approximate search, machine translation, speech recognition, speaker diarization, speech synthesis, optical character recognition, and computer-aided language learning.

In this paper, we propose a new data selection method which uses semi-supervised convolutional neural networks based on bitokens (Bi-SSCNNs) for training machine translation systems from a large bilingual corpus. In earlier work, we devised a data selection method based on semi-supervised convolutional neural networks (SSCNNs). The new method, Bi-SSCNN, is based on bitokens, which use bilingual information. When the new methods are tested on two translation tasks (Chinese-to-English and Arabic-to-English), they significantly outperform the other three data selection methods in the experiments. We also show that the BiSSCNN method is much more effective than other methods in preventing noisy sentence pairs from being chosen for training. More interestingly, this method only needs a tiny amount of in-domain data to train the selection model, which makes fine-grained topic-dependent translation adaptation possible. In the follow-up experiments, we find that neural machine translation (NMT) is more sensitive to noisy data than statistical machine translation (SMT). Therefore, Bi-SSCNN which can effectively screen out noisy sentence pairs, can benefit NMT much more than SMT.We observed a BLEU improvement over 3 points on an English-to-French WMT task when Bi-SSCNNs were used.

Recently, there has been interest in automatically generated word classes for improving statistical machine translation (SMT) quality: e.g, (Wuebker et al, 2013). We create new models by replacing words with word classes in features applied during decoding; we call these “coarse models”. We find that coarse versions of the bilingual language models (biLMs) of (Niehues et al, 2011) yield larger BLEU gains than the original biLMs. BiLMs provide phrase-based systems with rich contextual information from the source sentence; because they have a large number of types, they suffer from data sparsity. Niehues et al (2011) mitigated this problem by replacing source or target words with parts of speech (POSs). We vary their approach in two ways: by clustering words on the source or target side over a range of granularities (word clustering), and by clustering the bilingual units that make up biLMs (bitoken clustering). We find that loglinear combinations of the resulting coarse biLMs with each other and with coarse LMs (LMs based on word classes) yield even higher scores than single coarse models. When we add an appealing “generic” coarse configuration chosen on English > French devtest data to four language pairs (keeping the structure fixed, but providing language-pair-specific models for each pair), BLEU gains on blind test data against strong baselines averaged over 5 runs are +0.80 for English > French, +0.35 for French > English, +1.0 for Arabic > English, and +0.6 for Chinese > English.

In this paper, we propose two extensions to the vector space model (VSM) adaptation technique (Chen et al., 2013b) for statistical machine translation (SMT), both of which result in significant improvements. We also systematically compare the VSM techniques to three mixture model adaptation techniques: linear mixture, log-linear mixture (Foster and Kuhn, 2007), and provenance features (Chiang et al., 2011). Experiments on NIST Chinese-to-English and Arabic-to-English tasks show that all methods achieve significant improvement over a competitive non-adaptive baseline. Except for the original VSM adaptation method, all methods yield improvements in the +1.7-2.0 BLEU range. Combining them gives further significant improvements of up to +2.6-3.3 BLEU over the baseline.

In statistical machine translation systems, phrases with similar meanings often have similar but not identical distributions of translations. This paper proposes a new soft clustering method to smooth the conditional translation probabilities for a given phrase with those of semantically similar phrases. We call this semantic smoothing (SS). Moreover, we fabricate new phrase pairs that were not observed in training data, but which may be used for decoding. In learning curve experiments against a strong baseline, we obtain a consistent pattern of modest improvement from semantic smoothing, and further modest improvement from phrase pair fabrication.

Machine Translation traditionally treats documents as sets of independent sentences. In many genres, however, documents are highly structured, and their structure contains information that can be used to improve translation quality. We present a preliminary approach to document translation that uses structural features to modify the behaviour of a language model, at sentence-level granularity. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to incorporate structural information into statistical MT. In experiments on structured English/French documents from the Hansard corpus, we demonstrate small but statistically significant improvements.

Cet article décrit une approche combinant différents modèles statistiques pour la traduction automatique basée sur les segments. Pour ce faire, différentes ressources sont utilisées, dont deux corpus parallèles aux caractéristiques différentes et un dictionnaire de terminologie bilingue et ce, afin d’améliorer la performance quantitative et qualitative du système de traduction. Nous évaluons notre approche sur la paire de langues français-anglais et montrons comment la combinaison des ressources proposées améliore de façon significative les résultats.