Browsing by Author "Braune, Fabienne"

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    Decoding strategies for syntax-based statistical machine translation
    (2015) Braune, Fabienne; Maletti, Andreas (Dr.)
    Provided with a sentence in an input language, a human translator produces a sentence in the desired target language. The advances in artificial intelligence in the 1950s led to the idea of using machines instead of humans to generate translations. Based on this idea, the field of Machine Translation (MT) was created. The first MT systems aimed to map input text into the target translation through the application of hand-crafted rules. While this approach worked well for specific language-pairs on restricted fields, it was hardly extendable to new languages and domains because of the huge amount of human effort necessary to create new translation rules. The increase of computational power enabled Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) in the late 1980s, which addressed this problem by learning translation units automatically from large text collections. Statistical machine translation can be divided into several paradigms. Early systems modeled translation between words while later work extended these to sequences of words called phrases. A common point between word and phrase-based SMT is that the translation process takes place sequentially, which is not well suited to translate between languages where words need to be reordered over (potentially) long distances. Such reorderings led to the implementation of SMT systems based on formalisms that allow to translate recursively instead of sequentially. In these systems, called syntax-based systems, the translation units are modeled with formal grammar productions and translation is performed by assembling the productions of these grammars. This thesis contributes to the field of syntax-based SMT in two ways : (i) the applicability of a new grammar formalism is tested by building the first SMT system based on the local local Multi Bottom-Up Tree Transducer (l-MBOT) (ii) new ways to integrate linguistic annotations in the translation model (instead of the grammar rules) of syntax-based systems are developed.