Neural Machine Translation between similar South-Slavic languages

Machine translation aims to minimize the language barrier between people of different linguistic backgrounds. Machine translation is an automatic translation technique between pairs of different languages. Machine translation using neural network or neural machine translation came into the picture due to several limitation associated with its predecessors which are rule based and statistical based models. For large data sets with a rich range of vocabulary, the neural network machine translation system provides fair translation accuracy. We have observed that there remain very few machine translators dedicated to Indian languages, especially those spoken in the North-East area. So our paper mainly focuses on implementing a neural machine translation system for the English-Assamese language. In this paper we used five different neural machine translation models for English-Assamese language pair using LSTMs and GRUs, along with an attention layer. We have made a comparison analysis based on the performance results of these models. We used BLEU Score to calculate the accuracy of these five models, thus achieving a BLEU score of 34.168%, which was the highest among the five models.

Machine Translation (MT) systems are now being improved with the use of an ongoing methodology known as Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Natural language processing (NLP) researchers have shown that NMT systems are unable to deal with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words and multi-word expressions (MWEs) in the text. OOV terms are those that are not currently included in the vocabulary that is used by the NMT system. MWEs are phrases that consist of a minimum of two terms but are treated as a single unit. MWEs have great importance in NLP, linguistic theory, and MT systems. In this article, OOV words and MWEs are handled for the Punjabi to English NMT system. A parallel corpus for Punjabi to English containing MWEs was developed and used to train the different models of NMT. Punjabi is a low-resource language as it lacks the availability of a large parallel corpus for building various NLP tools, and this is an attempt to improve the accuracy of Punjabi in the English NMT system by using named entities and MWEs in the corpus. The developed NMT models were assessed using human evaluation through adequacy, fluency and overall rating as well as automated assessment tools such as the bilingual evaluation study (BLEU) and translation error rate (TER) score. Results show that using word embedding (WE) and MWEs corpus increased the accuracy of translation for the Punjabi to English language pair. The best BLEU score obtained was 15.45 for the small test set, 43.32 for the medium test set, and 34.5 for the large test set, respectively. The best TER rate score obtained was 57.34% for the small test set, 37.29% for the medium test set, and 53.79% for the large test set, repectively.

Intuitively, machine translation (MT) between closely related languages, such as Swedish and Danish, is easier than MT between more distant pairs, such as Finnish and Danish.Yet, the notions of 'closely related' languages and 'easier' translation have so far remained underspecified.Moreover, in the context of neural MT, this assumption was almost exclusively evaluated in scenarios where English was either the source or target language, leaving a broader cross-lingual view unexplored.In this work, we present a controlled study of language similarity and neural MT difficulty for 56 European translation directions.We test a range of language similarity metrics, some of which are reasonable predictors of MT difficulty.On a text-level, we reassess previously introduced indicators of MT difficulty, and find that they are not well-suited to our domain, or neural MT more generally.Ultimately, we hope that this work inspires further cross-lingual investigations of neural MT difficulty.

Machine Translation (MT) has recently been strengthened by the emergence of deep neural network techniques, which have brought the dream of language translation in community-based practices and clinical practices closer to reality. This chapter introduces the clinical practice of MT, especially in low resource languages. The following are some of the highlights of this chapter. How MT played a crucial role in good social reasons is focused on in this chapter. The chapter starts with the history of translation technologies that have played a vital role in various crisis and relief scenarios as the Haitian earthquake in 2010 and Translators without Borders (TWB), respectively. The Standby Task Force (SBTF) deployed the technology to tackle misinformation during Coronavirus Pandemic 2019. Next, the chapter explores the importance of the MT system, where it describes MT literacy as required across society to impact the healthcare of human beings. It describes the challenges of translation for clinical texts. Some of those are highlighted as (a) Domain: characteristics of clinical text differentiated from texts with other domains, (b) code mixed low-resource languages: noisy clinical data and lower quantity of data in the digital form available for computation, (c) lack of clinical domain corpora, and (d) very rich morphological structure: e.g., procedures (e.g., hepatico-cholangio-jejuno-stomy) and chemicals (e.g., Hydro-xy-nitro-di-hydro-thy-mine). Strategies or approaches to building MT on the clinical text can be categorized as: (1) Rule-based MT (early days), (2) Statistical MT (SMT, one of the successful methods in MT history), and (3) Neural MT (NMT, recent advancements of MT). Both SMT and NMT that work on same grounds by learning from text and are the primary focus of this chapter. L earning transparency for the patient's use of clinical data is an essential component. Much of today's healthcare data is unstructured text, such as clinical text, doctor's notes, nursing notes, lab reports, test reports, and more. A clinical practitioner is faced with a language barrier for communicating with a patient to interpret patient histories, examine a clinical diagnosis, or restate the recommended treatment method and follow-up to aid comprehension. The only way a medical practitioner encourages patients to ask questions or respond to queries is by directing them to input text with the help of MT. Finally, the chapter discusses contemporary techniques with Neural Machine Translation (NMT), namely multilingual, transfer learning on clinical data.

We conduct the first experiment in the literature in which a novel is translated automatically and then post-edited by professional literary translators. Our case study is Warbreaker, a popular fantasy novel originally written in English, which we translate into Catalan. We translated one chapter of the novel (over 3,700 words, 330 sentences) with two data-driven approaches to Machine Translation (MT): phrase-based statistical MT (PBMT) and neural MT (NMT). Both systems are tailored to novels; they are trained on over 100 million words of fiction. In the post-editing experiment, six professional translators with previous experience in literary translation translate subsets of this chapter under three alternating conditions: from scratch (the norm in the novel translation industry), post-editing PBMT, and post-editing NMT. We record all the keystrokes, the time taken to translate each sentence, as well as the number of pauses and their duration. Based on these measurements, and using mixed-effects models, we study post-editing effort across its three commonly studied dimensions: temporal, technical and cognitive. We observe that both MT approaches result in increases in translation productivity: PBMT by 18%, and NMT by 36%. Post-editing also leads to reductions in the number of keystrokes: by 9% with PBMT, and by 23% with NMT. Finally, regarding cognitive effort, post-editing results in fewer (29 and 42% less with PBMT and NMT, respectively) but longer pauses (14 and 25%).

Over the past ten years, neural machine translation (NMT) has seen tremendous growth and is now entering a phase of maturity. Despite being the most popular solution for machine translation (MT), it performs sub-optimally on under-resourced language pairs due to lack of parallel corpora as compared to high-resourced language pairs. The implementation of NMT techniques for under-resourced language pairs is receiving the attention of researchers and has resulted in a significant amount of research for many under-resourced language pairs. In view of the growth of MT, this paper describes a set of practical approaches for investigating MT between Kannada and Tulu. These two languages belong to the family of Dravidian languages and are under-resourced due to lack of tools and resources particularly the parallel corpus for MT. Since there are no parallel corpora for the Kannada-Tulu language pair for MT, this work aims to construct a parallel corpus for this language pair. As manual construction of parallel corpus is laborious, data augmentation is introduced to enhance the size of the parallel corpus along with suitable preprocessing techniques. Different NMT schemes such as recurrent neural network (RNN) baseline, bidirectional recurrent neural network (BiRNN), transformer-based NMT with and without subword tokenization, and statistical machine translation (SMT) models are implemented for MT of Kannada-Tulu and Tulu-Kannada language pairs. Empirical results reveal that the impact of data augmentation increases the bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score of the proposed models. Transformer-based models with subword tokenization outperformed the other models with BLEU scores 41.82 and 40.91 for Kannada-Tulu and Tulu-Kannada MT, respectively.

This paper proposes an English-Chinese machine translation research method based on transfer learning. First, it expounds the theory of neural machine translation and transfer learning and related technologies. Neural machine translation is discussed, the advantages and disadvantages of various models are introduced, and the transformer neural machine translation model framework is selected. For low-resource Chinese-English parallel corpus and Tibetan-Chinese parallel corpus, 30 million Chinese-English parallel corpora, 100,000 Chinese-English low-resource parallel corpora, and 100,000 Tibetan-Chinese parallel corpora were used to pretrain the transformer machine translation architecture. The decoders are all composed of 6 identical hidden layers, the initialization of the model parameters is done by the transformer uniform distribution, and the model training uses Adam as the optimizer. In the model transfer part, the parameters with the better effect of the pretrained model are transferred to the low-resource Chinese-English and Tibetan-Chinese machine translation model training, so as to achieve the purpose of knowledge transfer. The results show that the model transfer learning of low-resource Chinese-English parallel corpus improves the translation system's translation by 3.97 BLEU values compared with the translation system without transfer learning at 0.34 BLEU values. Model transfer learning on low-resource Tibetan-Chinese parallel corpus increases the BLEU value by 2.64 BLEU compared to the translation system without transfer learning. The neural machine translation system that uses BPE technology for preprocessing plus model transfer learning is compared to the translation system that only performs transfer learning and shows an improved 0.26 BLEU value.It is verified that the transfer learning method proposed in this paper has a certain improvement in the effect of low-resource Chinese-English and Tibetan-Chinese neural machine translation models.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) has achieved great success in the field of image processing, Adversarial Neural Machine Translation(NMT) is the application of GANs to machine translation. Unlike previous work training NMT model through maximizing the likelihood of the human translation, Adversarial NMT minimizes the distinction between human translation and the translation generated by a NMT model. Even though Adversarial NMT has achieved impressive results, while using little in the way of prior knowledge. In this paper, we integrated bilingual dictionaries to Adversarial NMT by leveraging a character model. Extensive experiment shows that our proposed methods can achieve remarkable improvement on the translation quality of Adversarial NMT, and obtain better result than several strong baselines.

Neural machine translation, which has an encoder-decoder framework, is considered to be a feasible way for future machine translation. Nevertheless, with the fusion of multiple languages and the continuous emergence of new words, most current neural machine translation systems based on von Neumann’s architecture have seen a substantial increase in the number of devices for the decoder, resulting in high-energy consumption rate. Here, a multilevel photosensitive blending semiconductor optoelectronic synaptic transistor (MOST) with two different trapping mechanisms is firstly demonstrated, which exhibits 8 stable and well distinguishable states and synaptic behaviors such as excitatory postsynaptic current, short-term memory, and long-term memory are successfully mimicked under illumination in the wavelength range of 480–800 nm. More importantly, an optical decoder model based on MOST is successfully fabricated, which is the first application of neuromorphic device in the field of neural machine translation, significantly simplifying the structure of traditional neural machine translation system. Moreover, as a multi-level synaptic device, MOST can further reduce the number of components and simplify the structure of the codec model under light illumination. This work first applies the neuromorphic device to neural machine translation, and proposes a multi-level synaptic transistor as the based cell of decoding module, which would lay the foundation for breaking the bottleneck of machine translation.

Introduction to the special issue on deep learning approaches for machine translation

Recently, neural machine translation (NMT) has made significant achievements in multiple language pairs, and surpassed traditional statistical machine translation. However, NMT has strict restrictions on vocabulary, which leads to out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problems. Agglutinative languages, such as Uyghur, which are rich in morphological changes, theoretically have unlimited vocabulary, and we confront with serious OOV problems with these languages in NMT. In a quest of how to reduce OOVs in Chinese - Uyghur pair NMT, we present two different solutions on this study: In the first solution, with regard of the key feature of agglutinative languages, the declension, we segment Uyghur words into stems and affixes. The NMT test we ran on the stem-affix segmented data showed that the number of OOVs reduced from an original 1526 to only 121. In the second solution, we ran a Similar Word Replacement test on low-frequency words from Chinese corpus after training and achieved an even more reduced OOV result of 98. The mass reduction of OOVs from 1.5 thousand to only a hundred signifies the effectiveness of the solutions in this study.

Machine translation is used to implement the translation between different languages. Neural machine translation is one of the most popular machine translation methods which have made a great progress in recent years especially on universal languages. However, domestic translation software for non-universal languages is limited and also needs improving. In this paper, we carry out a practice on neural machine translation from Indonesian to Chinese. We first build a bilingual corpus of Indonesian and Chinese. After that, we train translation models using neural machine translation method, with traditional statistical machine translation models as baselines. In the later stages of our practice, we develop a Web software, named as Lore Translator, basing on our so-far best translation model. The performance of our model is comparable to previous work.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have provably enhanced the state-of-the-art natural language process (NLP) with their capability of feature learning and representation. As one of the more challenging NLP tasks, neural machine translation (NMT) becomes a new approach to machine translation and generates much more fluent results compared to statistical machine translation (SMT). However, SMT is usually better than NMT in translation adequacy and word coverage. It is therefore a promising direction to combine the advantages of both NMT and SMT. In this article, we propose a deep neural network--based system combination framework leveraging both minimum Bayes-risk decoding and multi-source NMT, which take as input the N-best outputs of NMT and SMT systems and produce the final translation. In particular, we apply the proposed model to both RNN and self-attention networks with different segmentation granularity. We verify our approach empirically through a series of experiments on resource-rich Chinese⇒English and low-resource English⇒Vietnamese translation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of our proposed approach, which significantly outperforms the conventional system combination methods and the best individual system output.

With the active participation of users in product review platforms, online consumer-generated content, and, more specifically, user-generated reviews, have become a clear reference in purchasing decision-making processes, which sometimes exceed the impact of advertising campaigns. A common feature of most tourism review platforms is the use of machine translation (MT) systems to immediately make reviews available to users in various languages. However, the quality of the MT output of these reviews varies greatly, primarily due to the subjective and unstructured nature of this digital genre. Different studies confirm that there are no universal quality rating scales. The assessment of MT output quality usually depends on factors such as the purpose of the text or the value given to the immediacy of the translation. New neural MT systems have been a revolution in the quality increase of the translated output; however, new lines of research are opening up to verify whether the quality of this new paradigm of MT can be assessed with the existing scales, mainly from previous rule-based systems and statistical translation, or whether it is necessary to develop new quality metrics specifically for these new intelligent systems. On the other hand, one of the questions that remain to be resolved in this new context of neural MT is whether the use of large amounts of textual data in the training of these systems is as effective as the use of less data but of higher quality and better-adjusted to the specialty and type of text for which it is used. Based on the hypothesis that each genre requires specific quality rating scales, this work identifies the error patterns and textual characteristics of online user reviews from a corpus-based approach analysis that will contribute to adapting quality rating scales to this specific digital genre.

Sanskrit is one of the earliest native languages and is correctly described as "the gods' language" because of its wide use in Indian religious literature from the past. However, it is becoming less popular in modern India. Due in significant part to the need for more materials for translation both in and out of Sanskrit, it is no longer commonly utilized. This study explores the feasibility of using machine translation (MT) to provide a link between Sanskrit and, one of the earliest native languages, and its contemporary descendant Hindi. A study was conducted between existing modelling methodologies, notably Statistical machine translation (SMT), and the proposed novel deep learning-based Machine translation strategy using a manually created parallel corpus for the Sanskrit-Hindi language pair. While SMT creates interpretations by mapping phrases from the languages of the source and destination, statistical models, and bilingual text corpora for learning parameters, neural machine translation (NMT) frequently models entire phrases in a single integrated model, using a convolutional neural network to calculate the probability of a word sequence. The proposed NMT model is implemented using an encoder-decoder with an attention mechanism paradigm and the inclusion of gated recurrent units. Our approach involved development of a novel model for Sanskrit-Hindi machine translation using deep learning and the creation of parallel corpora for the Sanskrit-Hindi language pair. The proposed model is evaluated on automated and human-based metrics, and results show that our proposed deep learning-based model outperforms statistical modelling techniques on Moses, surpassing them both with a BLEU score of 53.8% compared to 34.56%. This article examines the undiscovered area of machine translation from Sanskrit to Hindi and discusses the main benefits and drawbacks of statistical and neural machine translation while providing a fresh viewpoint on the subject.