T-61.5020 Statistical Natural Language Processing
Exercises 9 -- Statistical machine translation
Version 1.1

1.
You are looking for answer to a problem that horsemen have pondered for a long time: ``Varför får hästen inte gå i bastun?'' (``Why shouldn't horse go in sauna?''). The solution is known only by the Swedish: ``Den blir ren och äter laven''. You have a language model and translation probabilities between English and Swedish words given in Table 1. You have two strong candidates for the translated sentence: Which is the more probable one?


Table: Unigram model in left, translation probabilities in right.
$ w$ $ P(w)$
it 0.18
becomes 0.05
clean 0.01
eats 0.1
the 0.12
seats 0.02
turns 0.07
into 0.11
a 0.21
reindeer 0.01
and 0.13
lichen 0.01
$ w_1$ $ w_2$ $ P(w_1 \rightarrow w_2)$
it den 1.0
becomes blir 0.7
becomes klär 0.3
turns blir 0.7
turns vänder 0.3
into [] 1.0
clean ren 0.9
clean städa 0.1
a [] 1.0
reindeer ren 1.0
and och 1.0
eats äter 1.0
the [] 1.0
seats laven 0.1
seats stolar 0.9
lichen laven 1.0


2.
(Computer assignment) Let's examine the problems of estimating translation probabilities. European Parliament Proceedings Parallel Corpus1 consists of sentence aligned texts between pairs of various European languages. Use a suitable parallel file, e.g. Finnish-English2.

The corpora include XML-style tags and other information not needed here. They can be removed using a Python script available in the course's web page3. The corpus package has separate files for the two languages, and the same line numbers of the same files are the corresponding sentences.

Next choose a relatively common word $ f$ of source language, e.g. Finnish. Find all the sentences which include that word from the Finnish corpus. Then go through the target language (e.g. English) and collect all the words $ e$ that are in the corresponding sentences (lines) where the Finnish word was found, together with their co-occurrence counts ($ C(e,f)$). Then try to find the most probable translation(s) from this set of words.

a)

Start using directly the number of co-occurrences $ C(e,f)$. How does it work?

b)

Try then to weight the values by the number of sentences where $ e$ occurs in the whole corpus, $ C(e)$.

c)

Try other kind of weights and/or statistical methods to find the correct translation possibilities. Some ideas can be found from the Exercise 5 that concerned collocations.



Footnotes

... Corpus1
Europarl: A Parallel Corpus for Statistical Machine Translation, Philipp Koehn, MT Summit 2005. http://www.statmt.org/europarl/
... Finnish-English2
http://www.statmt.org/europarl/v2/fi-en.tgz
... page3
Address: http://www.cis.hut.fi/Opinnot/T-61.5020/Exercises08/extra/cleanfile.py
Usage example: python cleanfile.py corpus_in corpus_out


svirpioj[a]cis.hut.fi