Hybridization of MT (AMTA 2006)

Nizar Habash (Columbia University)’s contribution to the AMTA Hybird MT Panel.

The Intuition: StatMT and RuleMT have complementary advantages:
Syntactic structure produces better global target linguistic structure,
Statistical phrase-based translation is more robust locally.

The Resource Challenge
Parallel corpora as models of performance vs. Dictionaries/analyzers as models of competence
“More is better” is true for both approaches

Parallel corpora are domain/genre specific
Dictionaries and parsers can be domain/genre specific

Hybrids may need more data: Annotated resources.

More on Social Impact of MT (AMTA 06 Panel)

Federico Gaspari (F.Gaspari @ postgrad.manchester.ac.uk) from University of Manchester, United Kingdom:

• Social impact of MT very visible on the Internet

• Only small minority of language supported

• Online MT has established a niche for itself

• Online MT promotes social interchange

• Users prepared to accept low-quality output

• Human translation simply not an option

Tsunami webpage to help find/identify victims in English translated into many languages with online MT systems such as Google and Altavista: http://www.inet.co.th/tsunami/ and http://www.tsunamihelp.blogspot.com.

Michael McCord (mcmccord @ us.ibm.com) from IBM Research:
Two social impact projects, sponsored by IBM Corporate Community Relations (CCR) and IBM Research:

1. ¡Tradúcelo Ahora!(Translate it Now): English↔Spanish MT for Latinos.
Server-based: Users need not install anything.
Web page translation. Uses enhancement of IBM product WebSphere Translation Server (WTS).
Email translation. Using any email client, and without installing any software, a user simply writes an email to anyone and copies a certain email account on our server. The email gets translated and sent to the user’s recipients and the user. Handles either Es or En source, and these can be mixed (does language ID).
Smart cross-lingual web search.
Work done by Nelson Correa and Esmé Manandise, M. McCord

To address the Hispanic Digital Divide, CCR has been working in partnership with nearly three dozen major agencies serving the Latino community since 2004.
These agencies receive grants from CCR, use the TA software, and give us feedback for improving the En-Es MT.
This year we are continuing that work, and also working with K-12 schools – doing web page translation, and translation for email between (mainly) Spanish-speaking parents and English-speaking school staff.

A study by the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute concluded that the TA project has benefited the participant organizations and their constituents in significant ways:
It simplified community outreach specialists’ efforts to conduct educational sessions on medical disorders for Spanish-speaking clients;
It enabled staff to more easily research online information about public services, jobs, clinical and legal issues, and translate the web pages for their clients;
It enriched English as a Second Language (ESL) program educational resources; It augmented and improved Spanish literacy courses;
It made it easier for clients to find employment at popular job search web sites, helped them apply for jobs online, and write resumes and cover letters;
It provided GED and ESL students a significant new tool for conducting research, reading the news, viewing transcripts, etc., and
It provided an additional teaching resource to enhance basic computer-training courses.

2. Cooperation with Meadan on English
Chat/blog system to foster Western-Islamic dialog

CCR and other parts of IBM are cooperating with the Meadan organization (Ed Bice et al.) to build this system. IBM is contributing mainly certain technical pieces: Arabic↔English MT. Salim Roukos’ group. Arabic Slot Grammar parser. McCord, Cavalli-Sforza. Uses Buckwalter’s BAMA for morphology. Will be used to: improve Ar→En MT + analyze Arabic text entries directly to make them into a searchable database (also ESG used for English entries). Parts of networking platform (IBM group in England).

Is MT a necessity for social justice in a multi-ethnic society?
Certainly translation is. MT should help when there aren’t enough human translators, and the MT is good enough.

Rami B. Safadi (safadi @ sakhr.us) from Sakhr Software USA. Social Impact of Translation Via SMS:

User sents message to be translated dialing a number (#2020), MT Server translates message and sents it back.

Motivation: For Sakhr Software: Revenues per message translated + Develop a dialect preprocessor. For Mobile phone companies: Value added services to retain customers + Free service.

English to Arabic (80%)
Over 50% Mobile advertisements & subscriptions
About 25% Dictionary, expressions, terminologies and short phrases
About 20% Chatting
About 5% Notifications for Bank accounts, Credit Cards, Prepaid cards….

Arabic to English (20%)
Over 70% Chatting
30% Dictionary, expressions, terminologies and short phrases

Available in 11 countries
Over 10,000 messages per day

Examples:
Win Laptops, Mp3 players & more!.. Join the Al Shamil Quiz Competition from 3 – 9 August; 5pm – 9pm at the Mall of the Emirates. (School Students only)
Sorry the transferred failed. You do not have sufficient credit.
Tell me ur coming or no i have duty 7 am

Cat eat my tongue (m’han tret les paraules de la boca!)

… when I took a look at Ed Bice’s slides for the AMTA Social Impact of MT Panel. Ed Bice is the founder of Meadan (ebice @ meadan.org), among many other things (his Pop web page).

hybrid distributed natural language translation (hdnlt) ‘web 2.0’ approach
• Language translation as a distributed service
• People/machines collaborate to provide service
• Volunteer translators as a social network
• Harness collective intelligence – value arises from small, shared
contributions
• Reputation driven – translator reputations adjusted by feedback
and performance
• Abstractions ease adding devices and services