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The AFRL-MITLL WMT16 news-translation task systems

Published in:
Proc. First Conf. on Machine Translation, Vol. 2, 11-12 August 2016, pp. 296-302.

Summary

This paper describes the AFRL-MITLL statistical machine translation systems and the improvements that were developed during the WMT16 evaluation campaign. New techniques applied this year include Neural Machine Translation, a unique selection process for language modelling data, additional out-of-vocabulary transliteration techniques, and morphology generation.
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Summary

This paper describes the AFRL-MITLL statistical machine translation systems and the improvements that were developed during the WMT16 evaluation campaign. New techniques applied this year include Neural Machine Translation, a unique selection process for language modelling data, additional out-of-vocabulary transliteration techniques, and morphology generation.

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Operational assessment of keyword search on oral history

Published in:
10th Language Resources and Evaluation Conf., LREC 2016, 23-8 May 2016.

Summary

This project assesses the resources necessary to make oral history searchable by means of automatic speech recognition (ASR). There are many inherent challenges in applying ASR to conversational speech: smaller training set sizes and varying demographics, among others. We assess the impact of dataset size, word error rate and term-weighted value on human search capability through an information retrieval task on Mechanical Turk. We use English oral history data collected by StoryCorps, a national organization that provides all people with the opportunity to record, share and preserve their stories, and control for a variety of demographics including age, gender, birthplace, and dialect on four different training set sizes. We show comparable search performance using a standard speech recognition system as with hand-transcribed data, which is promising for increased accessibility of conversational speech and oral history archives.
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Summary

This project assesses the resources necessary to make oral history searchable by means of automatic speech recognition (ASR). There are many inherent challenges in applying ASR to conversational speech: smaller training set sizes and varying demographics, among others. We assess the impact of dataset size, word error rate and term-weighted...

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The MITLL-AFRL IWSLT 2015 Systems

Summary

This report summarizes the MITLL-AFRL MT, ASR and SLT systems and the experiments run using them during the 2015 IWSLT evaluation campaign. We build on the progress made last year, and additionally experimented with neural MT, unknown word processing, and system combination. We applied these techniques to translating Chinese to English and English to Chinese. ASR systems are also improved by reining improvements developed last year. Finally, we combine our ASR and MT systems to produce a English to Chinese SLT system.
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Summary

This report summarizes the MITLL-AFRL MT, ASR and SLT systems and the experiments run using them during the 2015 IWSLT evaluation campaign. We build on the progress made last year, and additionally experimented with neural MT, unknown word processing, and system combination. We applied these techniques to translating Chinese to...

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The AFRL-MITLL WMT15 System: there's more than one way to decode it!

Published in:
Proc. 10th Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, 17-18 September 2015, pp. 112-9.

Summary

This paper describes the AFRL-MITLL statistical MT systems and the improvements that were developed during the WMT15 evaluation campaign. As part of these efforts we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance on the Russian to English translation task creating three submission systems with different decoding strategies. Out of vocabulary words were addressed with named entity postprocessing.
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Summary

This paper describes the AFRL-MITLL statistical MT systems and the improvements that were developed during the WMT15 evaluation campaign. As part of these efforts we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance on the Russian to English translation task creating three submission systems...

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The MITLL/AFRL IWSLT-2014 MT System

Summary

This report summarizes the MITLL-AFRL MT and ASR systems and the experiments run using them during the 2014 IWSLT evaluation campaign. Our MT system is much improved over last year, owing to integration of techniques such as PRO and DREM optimization, factored language models, neural network joint model rescoring, multiple phrase tables, and development set creation. We focused our efforts this year on the tasks of translating from Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and Farsi into English, as well as translating from English to French. ASR performance also improved, partly due to increased efforts with deep neural networks for hybrid and tandem systems. Work focused on both the English and Italian ASR tasks.
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Summary

This report summarizes the MITLL-AFRL MT and ASR systems and the experiments run using them during the 2014 IWSLT evaluation campaign. Our MT system is much improved over last year, owing to integration of techniques such as PRO and DREM optimization, factored language models, neural network joint model rescoring, multiple...

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Exploiting morphological, grammatical, and semantic correlates for improved text difficulty assessment

Author:
Published in:
Proc. 9th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, 26 June 2014, pp. 155-162.

Summary

We present a low-resource, language-independent system for text difficulty assessment. We replicate and improve upon a baseline by Shen et al. (2013) on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale. Our work demonstrates that the addition of morphological, information theoretic, and language modeling features to a traditional readability baseline greatly benefits our performance. We use the Margin-Infused Relaxed Algorithm and Support Vector Machines for experiments on Arabic, Dari, English, and Pashto, and provide a detailed analysis of our results.
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Summary

We present a low-resource, language-independent system for text difficulty assessment. We replicate and improve upon a baseline by Shen et al. (2013) on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale. Our work demonstrates that the addition of morphological, information theoretic, and language modeling features to a traditional readability baseline greatly benefits...

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The MIT-LL/AFRL IWSLT-2013 MT System

Summary

This paper describes the MIT-LL/AFRL statistical MT system and the improvements that were developed during the IWSLT 2013 evaluation campaign [1]. As part of these efforts, we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance on the Russian to English, Chinese to English, Arabic to English, and English to French TED-talk translation task. We also applied our existing ASR system to the TED-talk lecture ASR task. We discuss the architecture of the MIT-LL/AFRL MT system, improvements over our 2012 system, and experiments we ran during the IWSLT-2013 evaluation. Specifically, we focus on 1) cross-entropy filtering of MT training data, and 2) improved optimization techniques, 3) language modeling, and 4) approximation of out-of-vocabulary words.
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Summary

This paper describes the MIT-LL/AFRL statistical MT system and the improvements that were developed during the IWSLT 2013 evaluation campaign [1]. As part of these efforts, we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance on the Russian to English, Chinese to English, Arabic...

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A language-independent approach to automatic text difficulty assessment for second-language learners

Published in:
Proc. 2nd Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations, 4-9 August 2013.

Summary

In this paper we introduce a new baseline for language-independent text difficulty assessment applied to the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) proficiency scale. We demonstrate that reading level assessment is a discriminative problem that is best-suited for regression. Our baseline uses z-normalized shallow length features and TF-LOG weighted vectors on bag-of-words for Arabic, Dari, English, and Pashto. We compare Support Vector Machines and the Margin-Infused Relaxed Algorithm measured by mean squared error. We provide an analysis of which features are most predictive of a given level.
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Summary

In this paper we introduce a new baseline for language-independent text difficulty assessment applied to the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) proficiency scale. We demonstrate that reading level assessment is a discriminative problem that is best-suited for regression. Our baseline uses z-normalized shallow length features and TF-LOG weighted vectors on bag-of-words...

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