Machine Translation Humor

Studying computational linguistics isn't dull. There is always something to laugh about, including the subject itself.

Courtesy: xkcd #114

Lets look at that classic illustration of Machine Translation(MT) of the English phrase The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak to Russian and back. Lets see what would we get if we try with Japanese today.

• The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak Let's start
• 精神が、肉体が弱い喜んで into Japanese
• Spirit, willing flesh weak back into English
• 精神は、喜んで、肉は弱い back into Japanese
• Spirit is willing, flesh is weak back into English
• 精神、肉体が弱い喜んで back into Japanese
• Spirit, I'd have a weak body back into English
• 精神を、私は弱い体がしたい back into Japanese
• Spirit, I want a weak body back into English
• 精神を、私は、弱い体を back into Japanese
• Spirit, I have a weak body back into English
• 精神を、私は弱い肉体を持って back into Japanese
• Spirit, I have a weak body back into English

View the complete results at Translation party.

OPEN SOURCE TOOLS FOR MACHINE TRANSLATION

The Third Machine Translation Marathon, which will take place January 26-31 in Prague, Czech Republic, is hosting a Open Source Convention to advance the state of the art in machine translation.

We invite developers of open source tools to present their work and submit a paper of up to 10 pages that (a) describes the underlying methodology and (b) instructions how to use the tools. We are looking for stand-alone tools and extensions of existing tools, such as the Moses open source systems. Accepted papers will be presented during the MT Marathon and published as a special issue of the Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics (http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pbml).

Possible topics:

• training of machine translation models
• machine translation decoders
• tuning of machine translation systems
• evaluation of machine translation
• visualization, annotation or debugging tools
• tools for human translators
• interfaces for web-based services or APIs
• extensions of existing tools
• other tools for machine translation

Program will be selected from papers submitted by a program committee that will ask additional reviewers from the PBML's editorial board for at least two reviews per paper.

Important dates:

Deadline for paper submission: December 12, 2008
Notification of acceptance: December 19, 2008
Camera-ready paper due: January 8, 2009
Presentations: January 26-30, 2009 (at the MT Marathon in Prague)

Please send non-anonymized full-version submissions in .pdf format to Philipp Koehn . Please use the PBML style files from http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pbml-instructions.html (follow the "short paper" track instructions) or download the style package directly from http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pbml-style-standard.html.

Program Committee

Philipp Koehn (chair)
Chris Callison-Bruch
Jan Hajic

About the MT Marathon

MT Marathon is organized yearly by the EuroMatrix machine translation research project funded by the European Union under its "Cooperation programme" as a STREP project FP6-IST-5-034291-STP. In January 2009, it will be third MT Marathon organized by EuroMatrix. MT Marathon consists of several events taking place at the same place to allow for free flow of thoughts and exchange of information and experience: a "spring school" (this time more like a "winter school") with associated lab lessons, invited research talks, and a hands-on experience with Open Source MT tools. Participants will also experience evaluating Machine Translation systems (with some hands-on experience in actual subjective evaluation of MT systems taking part in the WMT 2009 competition - see more at http://www.statmt.org/wmt09/). This year, talks presenting some of the available OpenSource tools in more detail will also be planned throughout the week (see the call for papers). Please find more about the current MT Marathon and the previous ones at http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/euromatrix/mtmarathon.

About Euromatrix

The EuroMatrix project (http://www.euromatrix.net) aims at a major push in machine translation (MT) technology applying the most advanced MT technologies systematically to all pairs of EU languages. Special attention is being paid to the languages of the new and near-term prospective member states. As part of this application development, EuroMatrix designs and investigates novel combinations of statistical techniques and linguistic knowledge sources as well as hybrid MT architectures. EuroMatrix addresses urgent European economic and social needs by concentrating on European languages and on high-quality translation to be employed for the publication of technical, social, legal and political documents. EuroMatrix aims at enriching the statistical MT approach with novel learning paradigms and experiment with new combinations of methods and resources from statistical MT,rule-based MT, shallow language processing and computational lexicography/morphology.

The main objectives of the project are:

• Translation systems for all pairs of EU languages, with a special focus on the languages of new and near-term prospective member states
• Efficient inclusion of linguistic knowledge into statistical machine translation
• The development and testing of hybrid architectures for the integration of rule-based and statistical approaches
• Organization, analysis and interpretation of a competitive annual international evaluation of machine translation with a strong focus on European economic and social needs
• The provision of open source machine translation technology including research tools, software and data
• A systematically compiled and constantly updated detailed survey of the state of MT technology for all EU language pairs based on the developed systematic translation between all EU languages, the comparative MT evaluations and an inventory of available and needed tools, components, lingware and data.

THIRD MACHINE TRANSLATION MARATHON 2009

The MT Marathon 2009, organized by the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics of the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, is the third in a series of MT Marathons organized by the EU Euromatrix research project on Machine Translation.

The EuroMatrix consortium invites researchers, developers, students, and users of machine translation for participation. The event will feature

• Winter School classes on current methods in statistical MT
• Research showcase
• Open source convention on resources for machine translation, this time with an open call for papers (separate announcement will follow)
• Lab hands-on experience for system developers, students and programmers
• Workshop on evaluation of European language translation
• Where: Prague's Lesser Town, the newly renovated historical building of the Computer Science School of the Charles University in Prague
• When: January 26-31, 2009
• How: Registration is now possible!
• How much: Attendance is free of charge, but limited.

For more information and online registration please go to http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/euromatrix/mtmarathon.

About the MT Marathon

MT Marathon is organized yearly by the EuroMatrix machine translation research project funded by the European Union under its "Cooperation programme" as a STREP project FP6-IST-5-034291-STP. In January 2009, it will be third MT Marathon organized by EuroMatrix. MT Marathon consists of several events taking place at the same place to allow for free flow of thoughts and exchange of information and experience: a "spring school" (this time more like a "winter school") with associated lab lessons, invited research talks, and a hands-on experience with Open Source MT tools. Participants will also experience evaluating Machine Translation systems (with some hands-on experience in actual subjective evaluation of MT systems taking part in the WMT 2009 competition - see more at http://www.statmt.org/wmt09/). This year, talks presenting some of the available OpenSource tools in more detail will also be planned throughout the week (see the call for papers). Please find more about the current MT Marathon and the previous ones at http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/euromatrix/mtmarathon.

About Euromatrix

The EuroMatrix project (http://www.euromatrix.net) aims at a major push in machine translation (MT) technology applying the most advanced MT technologies systematically to all pairs of EU languages. Special attention is being paid to the languages of the new and near-term prospective member states. As part of this application development, EuroMatrix designs and investigates novel combinations of statistical techniques and linguistic knowledge sources as well as hybrid MT architectures. EuroMatrix addresses urgent European economic and social needs by concentrating on European languages and on high-quality translation to be employed for the publication of technical, social, legal and political documents. EuroMatrix aims at enriching the statistical MT approach with novel learning paradigms and experiment with new combinations of methods and resources from statistical MT, rule-based MT, shallow language processing and computational lexicography/morphology.

The main objectives of the project are:

• Translation systems for all pairs of EU languages, with a special focus on the languages of new and near-term prospective member states
• Efficient inclusion of linguistic knowledge into statistical machine translation
• The development and testing of hybrid architectures for the integration of rule-based and statistical approaches
• Organization, analysis and interpretation of a competitive annual international evaluation of machine translation with a strong focus on European economic and social needs
• The provision of open source machine translation technology including research tools, software and data
• A systematically compiled and constantly updated detailed survey of the state of MT technology for all EU language pairs based on the developed systematic translation between all EU languages, the comparative MT evaluations and an inventory of available and needed tools, components, lingware and data.

Apertium: Open source machine translation

If you are interested in Machine Translation(MT) then you should read this great introductory article on Apertium MT system. Well I didn't know that Apertium is the open-source Systran (the engine that powers Babelfish) Did you? .

At the time of writing this post, there are no stable language pair for Indian languages in Apertium, If you are interested in working on one, do send me a shout out.

Kudos to Jimmy O'Regan for writing this one.

Lttoolbox Install Notes

Lttoolbox is a lexical and morphological analyser package from the Apertium machine translation system. Here is a brief install notes taken from my NLP summer school lab notes.

Build Lttoolbox

Download the lttoolbox source package from sourceforge.

tar zxvf lttoolbox-xxxxx.tgz cd lttoolbox-xxxxx/ make make install

You will need root level permission to install other dependency packages for lttoolbox . GNU Debian users however should use the lttoolbox debian package available in stable/testing/unstable and also read the Installing Apertium on Debian documentation page for more information.

Usage

If the tool is installed properly then you can look up the program install path with which lt-comp command.

Here I am compiling the Hindi dictionary with a left-to-right option lr, the output is stored in binary format in file 'mydata'. This binary file is used by the lt-proc processor to do the morph analysis.

lt-comp lr hi.dix.noun_f mydata lt-proc ./mydata

For more information do read the manual pages for the lt-comp and lt-proc tools or fire me a email, I would love to you help you.