This paper explores the inference of sentence analogies not restricted to the formal level. We introduce MaskPrompt, a prompt-based method that addresses the analogy task as masked analogy completion. This enables us to fine-tune, in a lightweight manner, pre-trained language models on the task of reconstructing masked spans in analogy prompts. We apply constraints which are approximations of the parallelogram view of analogy to construct a corpus of sentence analogies from textual entailment sentence pairs. In the constructed corpus, sentence analogies are characterized by their level of being formal, ranging from strict to loose. We apply MaskPrompt on this corpus and compare MaskPrompt with the basic fine-tuning paradigm. Our experiments show that MaskPrompt outperforms basic fine-tuning in solving analogies in terms of overall performance, with gains of over 2% in accuracy. Furthermore, we study the contribution of loose analogies, i.e., analogies relaxed on the formal aspect. When fine-tuning with a small number of them (several hundreds), the accuracy on strict analogies jumps from 82% to 99%. This demonstrates that loose analogies effectively capture implicit but coherent analogical regularities. We also use MaskPrompt with different schemes on masked content to optimize analogy solutions. The best masking scheme during fine-tuning is to mask any term: it exhibits the highest robustness in accuracy on all tested equivalent forms of analogies.

This paper presents an approach to enhance the quality of machine translation by leveraging middle sentences as pivot points and employing dual reinforcement learning. Conventional methods for generating parallel sentence pairs for machine translation rely on parallel corpora, which may be scarce, resulting in limitations in translation quality. In contrast, our proposed method entails training two machine translation models in opposite directions, utilizing the middle sentence as a bridge for a virtuous feedback loop between the two models. This feedback loop resembles reinforcement learning, facilitating the models to make informed decisions based on mutual feedback. Experimental results substantiate that our proposed method significantly improves machine translation quality.

This paper introduces a novel translation technique, driven by modeling fuzzy analogies that capture approximate conformity to parallel transformations between fragments in sentences. We conduct preliminary experiments on English-Japanese translations with a data set of limited size. The results show the potential of using fuzzy analogies for translation, achieving an increase of about 6 BLEU points compared to NMT.

This paper gives a formula for the solution of an analogical equation between Booleans using the Sheffer stroke (NAND). Naturally, a counterpart using the Pierce arrow (NOR) is also given. Although not so intuitive, these formulae are somewhat elegant. The formulae are obtained in the following way: a rapid review on analogies between sets is given. The result on sets is transposed to Booleans. This result is rewritten using solely the operators mentioned above and simplified.

In this study, we introduce a novel approach to enhance sentence embedding by leveraging word analogy. Compared with past methods that use word analogy on sentence-level tasks, our method is less affected by sentence patterns and pays more attention to semantic relations. By fine-tuning pre-trained models as BERT, RoBERTa and Sentence-BERT and evaluating their performance on inter-sentence downstream tasks, we demonstrate the efficiency of our method. Our experimental results show that each model, following fine-tuning using our approach, exhibits improvements across all inter-sentence tasks. In the STS task, our method increases the average result from 18.63% to 62.52% on BERT. This outcome substantiates that sentence relationships derived from word analogy contain valuable knowledge that can enhance the performance of sentence embedding models.

We propose a method for solving sentence analogies using an embedding-to-embedding method. The method involves the pretraining of an autoencoder with a denoising decoder that generates sentence embeddings and reconstructs sentences. To generate solutions to analogical equations in the sentence embedding space, we introduce a network architecture that learns analogy properties from the dataset instead of relying on predefined formulas. The embeddings of the solutions are then decoded back into sentences using the decoder of the pretrained autoencoder. We conduct experiments on a set of semantico-formal analogies and purely-formal analogies datasets in English, French, and German. The results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in most cases and to some extent provides evidence of the limitations of the 3CosAdd formula in handling longer sentences.

The verification and resolution of formal analogies between strings focuses on the character sequences, disregarding the underlying semantics of the sequences. Our approach to these two tasks employs an algorithm based on edit distance. A previous version was limited in that it provided only a single solution for an analogy equation, even when multiple valid solutions existed. We enhance the algorithm to generate all possible solutions. The previous algorithm traversed edit distance matrices only once. Consequently, it could only yield one solution for an analogy puzzle, even in cases of multiple solutions were viable. In order to deliver all possible solutions for analogies, we introduce a recursive approach. By recursively exploring all traces in the edit distance matrices, our newer version is capable of generating and outputting all feasible solutions.

The present article proposes a method to solve analogies between sentences by combining existing techniques to solve formal analogies between strings and semantic analogies between words. The method is applied on sentences from the Tatoeba corpus. Two datasets of more than five thousand semantico-formal analogies, in English and French, are released.

Meaning Representation (AMR) is a broad -coverage formalism for capturing the semantics of a given sentence. However, domain adaptation of AMR is limited by the shortage of annotated AMR graphs. In this paper, we explore and build a new large-scale dataset with 2.3 million AMRs in the domain of academic writing. Additionally, we prove that 30% of them are of similar quality as the annotated data in the downstream AMR-to-text task. Our results outperform previous graph-based approaches by over 11 BLEU points. We provide a pipeline that integrates automated generation and evaluation. This can help explore other AMR benchmarks.

This paper introduces pretrained word embeddings for Manipuri, a low-resourced Indian language. The pretrained word embeddings based on fastText is capable of handling the highly agglutinative language Manipuri (mni). We then perform machine translation (MT) experiments using neural network (NN) models. In this paper, we confirm the following observations. Firstly, the reported BLEU score of the Transformer architecture with fastText word embedding model EM-FT performs better than without in all the NMT experiments. Secondly, we observe that adding more training data from a different domain of the test data negatively impacts translation accuracy. The resources reported in this paper are made available in the ELRA catalogue to help the low-resourced languages community with MT/NLP tasks.

We study the application of the #BenderRule in natural language processing articles, taking into account a contrastive and a diachronic dimensions, by examining the proceedings of two NLP conferences, TALN and ACL, over time. A sample of articles was annotated manually and two classifiers were developed to automatically annotate the remaining articles. This allows us to quantify the extent to which the #BenderRule is applied and to show a slight advantage in favor of TALN.

We created an English parallel corpus of 3,005 sentence pairs, each containing a well-polished text from ACL Anthology Reference Corpus (ACL-ARC) [1] and corresponding restated drafts collected from 26 non-native writers. The purpose of this paper is to explore the writing features of the drafts from non-native English speakers, so as to benefit research in Academic Writing Aid Systems. We present a feature analysis of the corpus based on handcrafted features. To assess utility, we formulate a draft identification task to automatically recognize drafts from ground truth texts based on hybrid features. We show that the combination of deep semantic features with the optimal handcrafted features improves identification accuracy on the collected data, up to 84.57%.

This article studies the application of the #BenderRule in Natural Language Processing (NLP) articles according to two dimensions. Firstly, in a contrastive manner, by considering two major international conferences, LREC and ACL, and secondly, in a diachronic manner, by inspecting nearly 14,000 articles over a period of time ranging from 2000 to 2020 for LREC and from 1979 to 2020 for ACL. For this purpose, we created a corpus from LREC and ACL articles from the above-mentioned periods, from which we manually annotated nearly 1,000. We then developed two classifiers to automatically annotate the rest of the corpus. We show that LREC articles tend to respect the #BenderRule (80 to 90% of them respect it), whereas only around half of ACL articles do. Interestingly, over the considered periods, the results appear to be stable for the two conferences, even though a rebound in ACL 2020 could be a sign of the influence of the blog post about the #BenderRule.

Prompt learning, a recent thread in few-shot learning for pre-trained language models (PLMs), has been explored for completing word analogies in the extractive way. In this paper, we reformulate the analogy task as masked analogy completion task with the use of prompting to derive a generative model for analogies beyond words. We introduce a simple prompt-based fine-tuning paradigm for language modeling on answered prompts of analogies in the sequence-to-sequence framework. To convert discrete terms of analogies into linear sequences, we present a symbolic prompt template. The sequence-to-sequence model is fine-tuned to fill in the missing span of masked prompts deduced from different masking schemes on phrase analogies extracted from a small corpus. We analyze the out-of-distribution performance on sentence analogies which are unseen cases. Our experiments demonstrate that prompt-based fine-tuning with the objective of language modeling enables models to achieve significantly better performance on in-distribution cases than PLMs. Masked prompt learning with one-term masking exhibits the best out-of-distribution generalization on sentence analogies, with a difference of only 3 characters from references.

This paper proposes a framework to ease the workload of preparation for interpreters through quick and efficient discovery of relevant material. We describe a software architecture and present arguments why this combination of components and functionalities will result in an ideal assignment preparation tool for interpreters, which they currently are lacking. We draw from the rich professional experience from interpretation experts and teaching staff gathered through interviews and feedback over an extended period of time. We use this experience to add functionalities to enrich, share, and store data; anywhere, be it at home, or on a mobile device while on the go. This results in a multimodal, flexible, easy to use, mobile-ready Web application. The framework allows for incremental extension, export and import of the data collection, keeping in mind accessibility, mobility, interoperability, reusability, and sustainability.

Example-based machine translation by analogy is an alternative approach to machine translation. Its principle is relatively simple, but the absolute number of analogies between sentences contained in the corpus is crucial for the overall quality of translation. The relative number of analogies is called the analogical density. The goal of this paper is to measure the analogical density of different aligned corpora. To this end, we extract analogies between sentences. Now, we use parse trees to represent sentences on the level of syntax. We report analogical densities for five different languages in an aligned multilingual corpus extracted from the Tatoeba resource, at the level of characters, words or parse trees.

Text morphing is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task which aims at generating sequences of fluent and smooth intermediate sentences between two input sentences, the start and end sentences. In this paper, we show how to use sentence analogies to augment data for this task. We rely on the notion of analogy to produce sequences of sentences exhibiting step-by-step transitions. We use these sequences to fine-tune a large-scale pre-trained language model that is used for text generation. The performance is evaluated by two criteria: fluency and transition smoothness on both the semantic and formal levels. Compared to a variational autoencoder generative model, our model is shown to generate smoother transitions, although the generated sentences are slightly less fluent.

The identification of terms in scientific and patent documents is a crucial issue for applications like information retrieval, text categorization, and also for machine translation. This paper describes a method to improve Chinese-Japanese statistical machine translation of patents by re-tokenizing the training corpus with aligned bilingual multi-word terms. We automatically extract multi-word terms from monolingual corpora by combining statistical and linguistic filtering methods. An automatic alignment method is used to identify corresponding terms. The most promising bilingual multi-word terms are extracted by setting some threshold on translation probabilities and further filtering by considering the components of the bilingual multi-word terms in characters as well as the ratio of their lengths in words. We also use kanji (Japanese)-hanzi (Chinese) character conversion to confirm and extract more promising bilingual multi-word terms. We obtain a high quality of correspondence with 93% in bilingual term extraction and a significant improvement of 1.5 BLEU score in a translation experiment. (c) 2017 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Increasing the size of parallel corpora for less-resourced language pairs is essential for machine translation (MT). To address the shortage of parallel corpora between Chinese and Japanese, we propose a method to construct a quasi-parallel corpus by inflating a small amount of Chinese–Japanese corpus, so as to improve statistical machine translation (SMT) quality. We generate new sentences using analogical associations based on large amounts of monolingual data and a small amount of parallel data. We filter over-generated sentences using two filtering methods: one based on BLEU and the second one based on N-sequences. We add the obtained aligned quasi-parallel corpus to a small parallel Chinese–Japanese corpus and perform SMT experiments. We obtain significant improvements over a baseline system.

Increasing the size of parallel corpora for less-resourced language pairs is essential for machine translation (MT). To address the shortage of parallel corpora between Chinese and Japanese, we propose a method to construct a quasi-parallel corpus by inflating a small amount of Chinese–Japanese corpus, so as to improve statistical machine translation (SMT) quality. We generate new sentences using analogical associations based on large amounts of monolingual data and a small amount of parallel data. We filter over-generated sentences using two filtering methods: one based on BLEU and the second one based on N-sequences. We add the obtained aligned quasi-parallel corpus to a small parallel Chinese–Japanese corpus and perform SMT experiments. We obtain significant improvements over a baseline system.

In recent years, statistical machine translation has gained much attention. The phrase-based statistical machine translation model has made significant advancement in translation quality over the word-based model. In this paper, we attempt to apply the technique of proportional analogy to statistical machine translation systems. We propose a novel approach to apply proportional analogy to generate translations of unseen n-grams from the phrase table for phrase-based statistical machine translation. Experiments are conducted with two datasets of different sizes. We also investigate two methods to integrate n-grams translations produced by proportional analogy into the state-of-the-art statistical machine translation system, Moses.(1) The experimental results show that unseen n-grams translations generated using the technique of proportional analogy are rewarding for statistical machine translation systems with small datasets. (c) 2016 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Copyright © 2016 for this paper by its authors.We address the problem of predicting unseen words by relying on the organization of the vocabulary of a language as exhibited by paradigm tables. We present a pipeline to automatically produce paradigm tables from all the words contained in a text. We measure how many unseen words from an unseen test text can be predicted using the paradigm tables obtained from a training text. Experiments are carried out in several languages to compare the morphological richness of languages, and also the richness of the vocabulary of different authors.

Copyright © 2016 for this paper by its authors.A neural network model to solve analogical equations between strings of symbols is proposed. The method transforms the input strings into two fixed size alignment matrices. The matrices act as the input of the neural network which predicts two output matrices. Finally, a string decoder transforms the predicted matrices into the final string output. By design, the neural network is constrained by several properties of analogy. The experimental results show a fast learning rate with a high prediction accuracy that can beat a baseline algorithm.

The Hierarchical Sub-Sentential Alignment (HSSA) method is a method to obtain aligned binary tree structures for two aligned sentences in translation correspondence. We propose to use the binary aligned tree structures delivered by this method as training data for preordering prior to machine translation. For that, we learn a Bracketing Transduction Grammar (BTG) from these binary aligned tree structures. In two oracle experiments in English to Japanese and Japanese to English translation, we show that it is theoretically possible to outperform a baseline system with a default distortion limit of 6, by about 2.5 and 5 BLEU points and, 7 and 10 RIBES points respectively, when preordering the source sentences using the learnt preordering model and using a distortion limit of 0. An attempt at learning a preordering model and its results are also reported.

Symmetrization of word alignments is the fundamental issue in statistical machine translation (SMT). In this paper, we describe an novel reformulation of Hierarchical Subsentential Alignment (HSSA) method using F-measure. Starting with a soft alignment matrix, we use the F-measure to recursively split ENGL the matrix into two soft alignment submatrices. A direction is chosen as the same time on the basis of Inversion Transduction Grammar (ITG). In other words, our method simplifies the processing of word alignment as recursive segmentation in a bipartite graph, which is simple and easy to implement. It can be considered as an alternative of growdiag- final-and heuristic. We show its application on phrase-based SMT systems combined with the state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, by feeding with word-to-word associations, it also can be a real-time word aligner. Our experiments show that, given a reliable lexicon translation table, this simple method can yield comparable results with state-of-theart approaches.

Over the last decade, an increasing amount of work has been done to advance the phrase-based statistical machine translation model in which the method of extracting phrase pairs consists of word alignment and phrase extraction. In this paper, we show that, for Japanese-English and Chinese-English statistical machine translation systems, this method is indeed missing potentially useful phrase pairs which could lead to better translation scores. These potentially useful phrase pairs can be detected by looking at the segmentation traces after decoding. We choose to see the problem of extracting potentially useful phrase pairs as a two-class classification problem: among all the possible phrase pairs, distinguish the useful ones from the not-useful ones. As for any classification problem, the question is to discover the relevant features which contribute the most. Extracting potentially useful phrase pairs resulted in a statistically significant improvement of 7.65 BLEU points in English-Chinese and 7.61 BLEU points in Chinese-English experiments. A slight increase of 0.94 BLEU points and 0.4 BLEU points is also observed for English-Japanese system and Japanese-English system, respectively.

Detecting language divergences and predicting possible sub-translations is one of the most essential issues in machine translation. Since the existence of translation divergences, it is impractical to straightforward translate from source sentence into target sentence while keeping the high degree of accuracy and without additional information. In this paper, we investigate the problem from an emerging and special point of view: bigrams and the corresponding translations. We first profile corpora and explore the constituents of bigrams in the source language. Then we translate unseen bigrams based on proportional analogy and filter the outputs using an Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The experiment results also show that even a small set of features from analogous can provide meaningful information in translating by analogy.

This paper proposes a new method of Chinese word segmentation based on proportional analogy and majority voting. First, we introduce an analogy-based method for solving the word segmentation problem. Second, we show how to use majority voting to make the decision on where to segment. The preliminary results show that this approach compares well with other segmenters reported in previous studies. As an important and original feature, our method does not need any pretraining or lexical knowledge.

The purpose of this chapter is to show how it is possible to efficiently extract the structure of a set of objects by use of the notion of proportional analogy. As a proportional analogy involves four objects, the very naive approach to the problem, has basically a complexity of O(n(4)) for a given set of n objects. We show, under some conditions on proportional analogy, how to reduce this complexity to O(n(2)) by considering an equivalent problem, that of enumerating analogical clusters that are informative and not redundant. We further show how some improvements make the task tractable. We illustrate our technique with a task related with natural language processing, that of clustering Chinese characters. In this way, we re-discover the graphical structure of these characters.

To improve the translation quality of less resourced language pairs, the most natural answer is to build larger and larger aligned training data, that is to make those language pairs well resourced. But aligned data is not always easy to collect. In contrast, monolingual data are usually easier to access. In this paper we show how to leverage unrelated unaligned monolingual data to construct additional training data that varies only a little from the original training data. We measure the contribution of such additional data to translation quality. We report an experiment between Chinese and Japanese where we use 70,000 sentences of unrelated unaligned monolingual additional data in each language to construct new sentence pairs that are not perfectly aligned. We add these sentence pairs to a training corpus of 110,000 sentence pairs, and report an increase of 6 BLEU points.

State-of-the-art phrase-based machine translation (MT) systems usually demand large parallel corpora in the step of training. The quality and the quantity of the training data exert a direct influence on the performance of such translation systems. The lack of open-source bilingual corpora for a particular language pair results in lower translation scores reported for such a language pair. This is the case of Chinese-Japanese. In this paper, we propose to build an extension of an initial parallel corpus in the form of quasi-parallel sentences, instead of adding new parallel sentences. The extension of the initial corpus is obtained by using monolingual analogical associations. Our experiments show that the use of such quasi-parallel corpora improves the performance of Chinese-Japanese translation systems.

We describe an approach to improve the performance of sampling-based sub-sentential alignment method on translation tasks by investigating the distribution of n-grams in the phrase tables. This approach consists in enforcing the alignment of n-grams. We compare the quality of phrase translation tables output by this approach and that of the state-of-the-art estimation approach in statistical machine translation tasks. We report significant improvements for this approach and show that merging phrase tables outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques.

An example-based machine translation (EBMT) system based on proportional analogies requires numerous proportional analogies between linguistic units to work properly. Consequently, long sentences cannot be handled directly in such a framework. Cutting sentences into chunks would be a solution. Using different markers, we count the number of proportional analogies between chunks in 11 European languages. As expected, the number of proportional analogies between chunks found is very high. These results, and preliminary experiments in translation, are promising for the EBMT system that we intend to build.

The problem of reordering remains the main problem in machine translation. Computing structures of sentences and the alignment of substructures is a way that has been proposed to solve this problem. We use secability to compute structures and show its effectiveness in an example-based machine translation.

Sub-sentential alignment is the process by which multi-word translation units are extracted from sentence-aligned multilingual parallel texts. This process is required, for instance, in the course of training statistical machine translation systems. Standard approaches typically rely on the estimation of several probabilistic models of increasing complexity and on the use of various heuristics, that make it possible to align, first isolated words, then, by extension, groups of words. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach which relies on a much simpler principle: the comparison of occurrence profiles in sub-corpora obtained by sampling. After analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, we show how to improve the detection of multi-word translation units and evaluate these improvements on machine translation tasks. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

© 2013 by Juan Luo, John Tinsley, and Yves Lepage.This paper presents a hybrid model for handling out-of-vocabulary words in Japanese to- English statistical machine translation output by exploiting parallel corpus. As the Japanese writing system makes use of four different script sets (kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romaji), we treat these scripts differently. A machine transliteration model is built to transliterate out-of vocabulary Japanese katakana words into English words. A Japanese dependency structure analyzer is employed to tackle out of-vocabulary kanji and hiragana words. The evaluation results demonstrate that it is an effective approach for addressing out-of vocabulary word problems and decreasing the OOVs rate in the Japanese-to-English machine translation tasks.

Unlike most Western languages, there are no typographic boundaries between words in written Japanese and Chinese. Word segmentation is thus normally adopted as an initial step in most natural language processing tasks for these Asian languages. Although word segmentation techniques have improved greatly both theoretically and practically, there still remains some problems to be tackled. In this paper, we present an effective approach in extracting Chinese and Japanese phrases without conducting word segmentation beforehand, using a sampling-based multilingual alignment method. According to our experiments, it is also feasible to train a statistical machine translation system on a small Japanese-Chinese training corpus without performing word segmentation beforehand. © 2012 The PACLIC.

© 2012 European Association for Machine Translation.We present a sub-sentential alignment algorithm that relies on association scores between words or phrases. This algorithm is inspired by previous work on alignment by recursive binary segmentation and on document clustering. We evaluate the resulting alignments on machine translation tasks and show that we can obtain state-of-the-art results, with gains up to more than 4 BLEU points compared to previous work, with a method that is simple, independent of the size of the corpus to be aligned, and directly computes symmetric alignments. This work also provides new insights regarding the use of "heuristic" alignment scores in statistical machine translation.

This paper describes an approach to improve the performance of sampling-based multilingual alignment on translation tasks by investigating the distribution of n-grams in the translation tables. This approach consists in enforcing the alignment of n-grams. The quality of phrase translation tables output by this approach and that of MGIZA++ is compared in statistical machine translation tasks. Significant improvements for this approach are reported. In addition, merging translation tables is shown to outperform state-of-the-art techniques. © 2011 by Juan Luo, Adrien Lardilleux, and Yves Lepage.

Analogy has been proposed as a possible principle for example-based machine translation. For such a framework to work properly, the training data should contain a large number of analogies between sentences. Consequently, such a framework can only work properly with short and repetitive sentences. To handle longer and more varied sentences, cutting the sentences into chunks could be a solution if the number of analogies between chunks is confirmed to be large. This paper thus reports counts of number of analogies using different numbers of chunk markers in 11 European languages. These experiments confirm that the number of analogies between chunks is very large: several tens of thousands of analogies between chunks extracted from sentences among which only very few analogies, if not none, were found. © 2011 by Kota Takeya and Yves Lepage.

This article proposes a possible way of measuring proximity between languages: it consists in measuring the commonality of structures between the vocabularies of two languages. Experiments conducted on a multilingual lexicon of nine European languages acquired from the Acquis communautaire confirmed usual knowledge on the closeness or remoteness of these languages. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

Word Sense Disambiguation is a crucial problem in documents whose purpose is to serve as specifications for automatic systems. The combination of different techniques of Natural Language Processing can help in this task. In this paper, we show how to detect ambiguous terms in Software Requirements Specifications. And we propose a computer-aided method that signals the reader for possibly ambiguous usage of terms. The method uses compound term measure (C-value), WordNet semantic similarity (WordNet wup-similarity) and a proposed semantic similarity measure between sentences. © 2011 IEEE.

This article delves into the scoring function of the statistical paraphrase generation model. It presents an algorithm for exact computation and two applicative experiments. The first experiment analyses the behaviour of a statistical paraphrase generation decoder, and raises some issues with the ordering of n-best outputs. The second experiment shows that a major boost of performance can be obtained by embedding a true score computation inside a Monte-Carlo sampling based paraphrase generator.

In a series of preparatory experiments in 4 languages on subsets of the Europarl corpus, we show that a large number of unseen trigrams can be reconstructed by proportional analogy with trigrams having the lowest frequencies. We derive a very simple smoothing scheme from this empirical result and show that it outperforms Good-Turing and Kneser-Ney smoothing schemes on trigrams models in all 11 languages on the common multilingual part of the Europarl corpus, except Finnish. ©2010 IEEE.