[CL+NLP Lunch] CL/NLP lunch: Chris Dyer, morphology in machine translation, TUESDAY@ noon

[Benjamin Lambert]

Hi everyone,

This is a friendly reminder that LTI postdoc Chris Dyer will be speaking on morphology in machine translation tomorrow (Tuesday!) at noon.  We plan to be finished before 1pm, so folks can also attend Greg's thesis proposal at 1pm.

Ben & Nathan


Tuesday, Jan. 18 @ noon
GHC 6115

Chris Dyer
Postdoctoral Fellow, LTI

Inflectional Morphology in Probabilistic Translation Models

Abstract:
In conventional translation models, words that differ from each other
in any way are modeled independently of each other. From a modeling
perspective, this is unsatisfying since closely related morphological
forms of an underlying stem are likely to share many characteristics
that are important for translation. And, more practically, this
independence assumption means data sparsity is a significant issue in
translation between morphologically complex languages.

I compare two new probabilistic translation models that relax this
"lexical independence assumption" and share statistics across
morphologically related word forms. The first model is generative,
based on hierarchical Pitman-Yor processes, in which the translation
distributions for different inflection variants of a stem share a
common base distribution. The second model is based on Markov random
fields and uses morphological features to share information across
related forms.

Lunch will be provided.