Tools for Multilingual Grammar-Based Translation on the Web

What it is about

A system demonstration of tools for restricted-language translation on the web, built on GF. The authors argue that precision-oriented translation fits producers of content, whose input is predictable and limited to their own domain, and they name two problems that block it: the cost of building a translator for each domain and language, and the need for authors to write inside the grammar. Their answers are a resource grammar library that gives inflection and syntax for fifteen languages, so that a domain grammar only needs a lexicon and the application functions. A one-argument paradigm function (mkV) gives the right inflection table for about 90 percent of Finnish verbs, and the resource grammar's combination functions are written once for all languages. Translation is interlingual, with n+1 components for n languages where transfer systems need n(n-1). Authoring is helped by incremental prediction: the parser offers next words only when they are grammatical in context, and a change to one word, such as femme to homme, regenerates the agreeing words through the tree.

Ideas

• I1. Report coverage per input sentence: the share of its tokens the reader can take, and the list of tokens it cannot. Built from the reader's known contexts, this is a count-based prediction of what the translator will read, and it tells an author which words to change before translating.
• I2. Test regeneration after an edit. Change one meta token (for example a gender feature of a concept) and check that the dependent tokens of the same author pick up the agreement. A few hand-made sentences would show whether the encoder regenerates agreement from the tree, or leaves the old forms.
• I3. Replace exceptions-by-hand with a rule plus a list of exceptions for the morph fallback. The paper's smart paradigm covers most verbs with one argument. For Mova, the bare-form fallback for unseen concepts can take the same form, with the exception list counted, so the coverage of the rule is visible.

For Mova

The code is tools/translate (the coverage report and the fallback in profile.rs), tools/roundtrip and the morph code in en/src/morph.rs. The change-propagation idea depends on the encoder writing from the tree, which is open problem 3. The paper's system is not a model for Mova's learning, since its grammars are written by hand, but the coverage report and the regeneration test are both cheap measures.

Topics: Machine translation

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{ranta2010tools,
  title = {{Tools for Multilingual Grammar-Based Translation on the Web}},
  author = {Ranta, Aarne and Angelov, Krasimir and Hallgren, Thomas},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACL 2010 System Demonstrations},
  year = {2010},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/P10-4012/}
}

References

34 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Alshawi, H. (1992). The Core Language Engine. Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press. find
2. Angelov, K. (2008). Type-Theoretical Bulgarian Grammar. In B. Nordström and A. Ranta (Eds.), Advances in Natural Language Processing (Go-TAL 2008), Volume 5221 of LNCS/LNAI, pp. 52– 64. URL http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-540-85286-5/. ↗
3. Angelov, K. (2009). Incremental Parsing with Parallel Multiple Context-Free Grammars. In Proceedings of EACL’09, Athens. find
4. Angelov, K. and A. Ranta (2009). Implementing Controlled Languages in GF. In Proceedings of CNL-2009, Marettimo, LNCS. to appear. find
5. Bar-Hillel, Y. (1964). Language and Information. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. find
6. Beckert, B., R. Hähnle, and P. H. Schmitt (Eds.) (2007). Verification of Object-Oriented Software: The KeY Approach. LNCS 4334. Springer-Verlag. find
7. Bender, E. M. and D. Flickinger (2005). Rapid prototyping of scalable grammars: Towards modularity in extensions to a language-independent core. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing IJCNLP-05 (Posters/Demos), Jeju Island, Korea. URL http://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/modules05.pdf. ↗
8. Bresnan, J. (Ed.) (1982). The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations. MIT Press. find
9. Bringert, B., K. Angelov, and A. Ranta (2009). Grammatical Framework Web Service. In Proceedings of EACL’09, Athens. find
10. Butt, M., H. Dyvik, T. H. King, H. Masuichi, and C. Rohrer (2002). The Parallel Grammar Project. In COLING 2002, Workshop on Grammar Engineering and Evaluation, pp. 1–7. URL http://www2.parc.com/isl/groups/nltt/pargram/buttetal-coling02.pdf. ↗
11. Chandioux, J. (1976). MÉTÉO: un système opérationnel pour la traduction automatique des bulletins météreologiques destinés au grand public. META 21, 127–133. find
12. Curry, H. B. (1961). Some logical aspects of grammatical structure. In R. Jakobson (Ed.), Structure of Language and its Mathematical Aspects: Proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium in Applied Mathematics, pp. 56–68. American Mathematical Society. find
13. Dada, A. E. and A. Ranta (2007). Implementing an Open Source Arabic Resource Grammar in GF. In M. Mughazy (Ed.), Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XX, pp. 209–232. John Benjamin’s. find
14. Dean, M. and G. Schreiber (2004). OWL Web Ontology Language Reference. URL http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/. ↗
15. Dymetman, M., V. Lux, and A. Ranta (2000). XML and multilingual document authoring: Convergent trends. In COLING, Saarbrücken, Germany, pp. 243–249. URL http://www.cs.chalmers.se/ ∼ aarne/ articles/coling2000.ps.gz. ↗
16. Enache, R., A. Ranta, and K. Angelov (2010). An Open-Source Computational Grammar for Romanian. In A. Gelbukh (Ed.), Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics (CICLing-2010), Iasi, Romania, March 2010, LNCS, to appear. find
17. Fuchs, N. E., K. Kaljurand, and T. Kuhn (2008). Attempto Controlled English for Knowledge Representation. In C. Baroglio, P. A. Bonatti, J. Małuszyński, M. Marchiori, A. Polleres, and S. Schaffert (Eds.), Reasoning Web, Fourth International Summer School 2008, Number 5224 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 104–124. Springer. find
18. Hallgren, T. and A. Ranta (2000). An extensible proof text editor. In M. Parigot and A. Voronkov (Eds.), LPAR-2000, Volume 1955 of LNCS/LNAI, pp. 70–84. Springer. URL http://www.cs.chalmers.se/ ∼ aarne/ articles/lpar2000.ps.gz. ↗
19. Harper, R., F. Honsell, and G. Plotkin (1993). A Framework for Defining Logics. JACM 40(1), 143– 184. find
20. Joshi, A. (1985). Tree-adjoining grammars: How much context-sensitivity is required to provide reasonable structural descriptions. In D. Dowty, L. Karttunen, and A. Zwicky (Eds.), Natural Language Parsing, pp. 206–250. Cambridge University Press. find
21. Khegai, J. (2006). GF Parallel Resource Grammars and Russian. In Coling/ACL 2006, pp. 475–482. find
22. Khegai, J., B. Nordström, and A. Ranta (2003). Multilingual Syntax Editing in GF. In A. Gelbukh (Ed.), Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics (CICLing-2003), Mexico City, February 2003, Volume 2588 of LNCS, pp. 453–464. Springer-Verlag. URL http://www.cs.chalmers.se/ ∼ aarne/ articles/mexico.ps.gz. ↗
23. Martin-Löf, P. (1984). Napoli: Bibliopolis. Intuitionistic Type Theory. find
24. Meza Moreno, M. S. and B. Bringert (2008). Interactive Multilingual Web Applications with Grammarical Framework. In B. Nordström and A. Ranta (Eds.), Advances in Natural Language Processing (GoTAL 2008), Volume 5221 of LNCS/LNAI, pp. 336–347. URL http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-540-85286-5/. ↗
25. Montague, R. (1974). Formal Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Collected papers edited by Richmond Thomason. find
26. Perera, N. and A. Ranta (2007). Dialogue System Localization with the GF Resource Grammar Library. In SPEECHGRAM 2007: ACL Workshop on Grammar-Based Approaches to Spoken Language Processing, June 29, 2007, Prague. URL http://www.cs.chalmers.se/ ∼ aarne/ articles/perera-ranta.pdf. ↗
27. Pollard, C. and I. Sag (1994). Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. University of Chicago Press. find
28. Power, R. and D. Scott (1998). Multilingual authoring using feedback texts. In COLING-ACL. find
29. Ranta, A. (1994). Type Theoretical Grammar. Oxford University Press. find
30. Ranta, A. (2004). Grammatical Framework: A Type-Theoretical Grammar Formalism. The Journal of Functional Programming 14(2), 145– 189. URL http://www.cs.chalmers.se/∼ aarne/articles/gf-jfp.ps.gz. ↗
31. Ranta, A. (2009a). Grammars as Software Libraries. In Y. Bertot, G. Huet, J.-J. Lévy, and G. Plotkin (Eds.), From Semantics to Computer Science. Cambridge University Press. URL http://www.cs.chalmers.se/ ∼ aarne/ articles/libraries-kahn.pdf. ↗
32. Ranta, A. (2009b). The GF Resource Grammar Library. In Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, Vol. 2. URL http://elanguage.net/journals/index. php/lilt/article/viewFile/214/158. ↗
33. Rosetta, M. T. (1994). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Compositional Translation. find
34. Shieber, S. M. and Y. Schabes (1990). Synchronous tree-adjoining grammars. In COLING, pp. 253–258. find

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ranta-2010-tools-multilingual-grammar-based-translation/