Publications
Interlingua-based English-Korean two-way speech translation of doctor-patient dialogues with CCLINC
January 1, 2002
Journal Article
Published in:
Machine Trans. Vol. 17, No. 3, 2002, pp. 213-243.
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Summary
Development of a robust two-way real-time speech translation system exposes researchers and system developers to various challenges of machine translation (MT) and spoken language dialogues. The need for communicating in at least two different languages poses problems not present for a monolingual spoken language dialogue system, where no MT engine is embedded within the process flow. Integration of various component modules for real-time operation poses challenges not present for text translation. In this paper, we present the CCLINC (Common Coalition Language System at Lincoln Laboratory) English-Korean two-way speech translation system prototype trained on doctor-patient dialogues, which integrates various techniques to tackle the challenges of automatic real-time speech translation. Key features of the system include (i) language-independent meaning representation which preserves the hierarchical predicate-argument structure of an input utterance, providing a powerful mechanism for discourse understanding of utterances originating from different languages, word-sense disambiguation and generation of various word orders of many languages, (ii) adoption of the DARPA Communicator architecture, a plug-and-play distributed system architecture which facilitates integration of component modules and system operation in real time, and (iii) automatic acquisition of grammar rules and lexicons for easy porting of the system to different languages and domains. We describe these features in detail and present experimental results.
Summary
Development of a robust two-way real-time speech translation system exposes researchers and system developers to various challenges of machine translation (MT) and spoken language dialogues. The need for communicating in at least two different languages poses problems not present for a monolingual spoken language dialogue system, where no MT engine...
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Toward an improved concept-based information retrieval system
September 9, 2001
Conference Paper
Published in:
Proc. of the 24th Annual ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 9-13 September 2001, pp. 384-385.
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This paper presents a novel information retrieval system that includes 1) the addition of concepts to facilitate the identification of the correct word sense, 2) a natural language query interface, 3) the inclusion of weights and penalties for proper nouns that build upon the Okapi weighting scheme, and 4) a term clustering technique that exploits the spatial proximity of search terms in a document to further improve the performance. The effectiveness of the system is validated by experimental results.
Summary
This paper presents a novel information retrieval system that includes 1) the addition of concepts to facilitate the identification of the correct word sense, 2) a natural language query interface, 3) the inclusion of weights and penalties for proper nouns that build upon the Okapi weighting scheme, and 4) a...
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Interlingua-based broad-coverage Korean-to-English translation in CCLINC
March 18, 2001
Conference Paper
Published in:
Proc. First Int. Conf. on Human Language Technology, 18-21 March 2001.
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At MIT Lincoln Laboratory, we have been developing a Korean-to-English machine translation system CCLINC (Common Coalition Language System at Lincoln Laboratory). The CCLINC Korean-to-English translation system consists of two core modules, language understanding and generation modules mediated by a language neutral meaning representation called a semantic frame. The key features of the system include: (i) Robust efficient parsing of Korean (a verb final language with overt case markers, relatively free word order, and frequent omissions of arguments). (ii) High quality translation via word sense disambiguation and accurate word order generation of the target language. (iii) Rapid system development and porting to new domains via knowledge-based automated acquisition of grammars. Having been trained on Korean newspaper articles on "missiles" and "chemical biological warfare," the system produces the translation output sufficient for content understanding of the original document.
Summary
At MIT Lincoln Laboratory, we have been developing a Korean-to-English machine translation system CCLINC (Common Coalition Language System at Lincoln Laboratory). The CCLINC Korean-to-English translation system consists of two core modules, language understanding and generation modules mediated by a language neutral meaning representation called a semantic frame. The key features...
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Understanding-based translingual information retrieval
June 17, 1999
Conference Paper
Published in:
4th Int. Conf. on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, 17-19 June 1999, pp. 187-195.
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Summary
This paper describes our preliminary research on an understanding-based translingual information retrieval system for which the input to the system is a query sentence in English, and the output of the system is a set of documents either in English or in Korean. The understanding module produces a meaning representation --- called semantic frame --- of the input sentence where the predicate-argument structure and the question-type of the input are identified, and each keyword is assigned its concept category. The translingual search module performs search on an English and Korean bilingual corpus tagged with concept categories. The results of our preliminary experiment, performed an a document set consisting of slides and notes from English and Korean briefings in a military domain, indicate that an understanding-based approach to information retrieval combined with concept-based search technique improves both precision and recall compared with a keyword match technique without understanding for both monolingual- and translingual retrieval. Current work is directed at further development of the system, and in preparation for tests on larger copora.
Summary
This paper describes our preliminary research on an understanding-based translingual information retrieval system for which the input to the system is a query sentence in English, and the output of the system is a set of documents either in English or in Korean. The understanding module produces a meaning representation...
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Machine-assisted language translation for U.S./RoK Combined Forces Command
January 1, 1999
Journal Article
Published in:
Army RD&A Mag., November-December 1999, pp. 38-41.
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Summary
The U.S. military must operate worldwide in a variety of international environments where many different languages are used. There is a critical need for translation, and there is a shortage of translators who can interpret military terminology specifically. One coalition environment where the need is particularly strong is in the Republic of Korea (RoK) where, although U.S. and RoK military personnel have been working together for many years, the language barrier still significantly reduces the speed and effectiveness of coalition command and control. This article describes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory's work on automated, two-way, English/Korean translation for enhanced coalition communications. Our ultimate goal is to enhance multilingual communications by producing accurate translations across a number of languages. Therefore, we have chosen an interlingua-based approach to machine translation that is readily adaptable to multiple languages. In this approach, a natural language understanding system transforms the input into an intermediate meaning representation called Semantic Frame, which serves as a basis for generating output in multiple languages. To produce useful and effective translation systems in the short term, we have focused on limited military task domains and have configured our system as a machine-assisted translation system. This allows the human translator to confirm or edit the machine translation.
Summary
The U.S. military must operate worldwide in a variety of international environments where many different languages are used. There is a critical need for translation, and there is a shortage of translators who can interpret military terminology specifically. One coalition environment where the need is particularly strong is in the...
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Ambiguity resolution for machine translation of telegraphic messages
July 7, 1997
Conference Paper
Published in:
Proc. 35th Annual Meeting of the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics, 7-12 July 1997, pp. 120-7.
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Summary
Telegraphic messages with numerous instances of omission pose a new challenge to parsing in that a sentence with omission causes a higher degree of ambiguity than a sentence without omission. Misparsing reduced by omissions has a far-reaching consequence in machine translation. Namely, a misparse of the input often leads to a translation into the target language which has incoherent meaning in the given context. This is more frequently the case if the structures of the source and target languages are quite different, as in English and Korean. Thus, the question of how we parse telegraphic messages accurately and efficiently becomes a critical issue in machine translation. In this paper we describe a technical solution for the issue, and present the performance evaluation of a machine translation system on telegraphic messages before and after adopting the proposed solution. The solution lies in a grammar design in which lexicalized grammar rules defined in terms of semantic categories and syntactic rules defined in terms of part-of-speech are utilized together. The proposed grammar achieves a higher parsing coverage without increasing the amount of ambiguity/misparsing when compared with a purely lexicalized semantic grammar, and achieves a lower degree of ambiguity/misparses without, decreasing the parsing coverage when compared with a purely syntactic grammar.
Summary
Telegraphic messages with numerous instances of omission pose a new challenge to parsing in that a sentence with omission causes a higher degree of ambiguity than a sentence without omission. Misparsing reduced by omissions has a far-reaching consequence in machine translation. Namely, a misparse of the input often leads to...
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Automated English-Korean translation for enhanced coalition communications
January 1, 1997
Journal Article
Published in:
Lincoln Laboratory Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1997, pp. 35-60.
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Summary
This article describes our progress on automated, two-way English-Korean translation of text and speech for enhanced military coalition communications. Our goal is to improve multilingual communications by producing accurate translations across a number of languages. Therefore, we have chosen an interlingua-based approach to machine translation that readily extends to multiple languages. In this approach, a natural-language-understanding system transforms the input into an intermediate-meaning representation called a semantic frame, which serves as the basis for generating output in multiple languages. To produce useful, accurate, and effective translation systems in the short term, we have focused on limited military-task domains, and have configured our system as a translator's aid so that the human translator can confirm or edit the machine translation. We have obtained promising results in translation of telegraphic military messages in a naval domain, and have successfully extended the system to additional military domains. The system has been demonstrated in a coalition exercise and at Combined Forces Command in the Republic of Korea. From these demonstrations we learned that the system must be robust enough to handle new inputs, which is why we have developed a multistage robust translation strategy, including a part-of-speech tagging technique to handle new works, and a fragmentation strategy for handling complex sentences. Our current work emphasizes ongoing development of these robust translation techniques and extending the translation system to application domains of interest to users in the military coalition environment in the Republic of Korea.
Summary
This article describes our progress on automated, two-way English-Korean translation of text and speech for enhanced military coalition communications. Our goal is to improve multilingual communications by producing accurate translations across a number of languages. Therefore, we have chosen an interlingua-based approach to machine translation that readily extends to multiple...
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Automatic English-to-Korean text translation of telegraphic messages in a limited domain
August 5, 1996
Conference Paper
Published in:
Proc. Int. Conf. on Computational Linguistics, 5-9 August 1996, pp. 705-710.
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This paper describes our work-in-progress in automatic English-to-Korean text; translation. This work is an initial step toward the ultimate goal of text and speech translation for enhanced multilingual and multinational operations. For this purpose, we have adopted an interlingual approach with natural language understanding (TINA) and generation (GENESIS) modules at the core. We tackle the ambiguity problem by incorporating syntactic and semantic categories in the analysis grammar. Our system is capable of producing accurate translation of complex sentences (38 words) and sentence fragments as well as average length (12 words) grammatical sentences. Two types of system evaluation have been carried out: one for grammar coverage and the other for overall performance. For system robustness, integration of two subsystems is under way: (i) a rule-based part-of-speech tagger to handle unknown words/constructions, and (ii) a word-for-word translator to handle other system failures.
Summary
This paper describes our work-in-progress in automatic English-to-Korean text; translation. This work is an initial step toward the ultimate goal of text and speech translation for enhanced multilingual and multinational operations. For this purpose, we have adopted an interlingual approach with natural language understanding (TINA) and generation (GENESIS) modules at...
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