Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Inducing translation templates with type constraints

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Machine Translation

Abstract

This paper presents a generalization technique that induces translation templates from a given set of translation examples by replacing differing parts in the examples with typed variables. Since the type of each variable is inferred during the learning process, each induced template is also associated with a set of type constraints. The type constraints that are associated with a translation template restrict the usage of the translation template in certain contexts in order to avoid some of the wrong translations. The types of variables are induced using type lattices designed for both the source and target languages. The proposed generalization technique has been implemented as a part of an example-based machine translation system.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Akiba Y, Ishii M, Almuallim H, Kaneda S (1995) Learning English verb selection rules from hand-made rules and translation examples. In: Proceedings of the sixth international conference on theoretical and methodological issues in machine translation, Leuven, Belgium, pp 206–220

  • Almuallim H, Akiba Y, Yamazaki T, Yokoo A, Kaneda S (1994) Two methods for learning ALT-J/E translation rules from examples and a semantic hierarchy. In: Coling 94: The 15th international conference on computational linguistics, Kyoto, Japan, pp 57–63

  • Brown RD (2003) Clustered transfer rule induction for example-based translation. In: Carl M, Way A (eds), pp 287–305

  • Budanitsky A, Hirst G (2001) Semantic distance in WordNet: An experimental, application-oriented evaluation of five measures. In: Proceedings of workshop on WordNet and other lexical resources: applications, extensions and customizations, Pittsburgh, PA, pp 29–34

  • Carl M (1999) Inducing translation templates for example-based machine translation. In: Proceedings of MT summit VII “MT in the great translation era”, Singapore, pp 250–258

  • Carl M (2003) Inducing translation grammars from bracketed alignments. In: Carl M, Way A (eds) pp 339–361

  • Carl M, Way A (eds) (2003) Recent advances in example-based machine translation. Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands

  • Cicekli I, Güvenir HA (2001) Learning translation templates from bilingual translation examples. Appl Intell 15: 57–76

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cicekli I, Güvenir HA (2003) Learning translation templates from bilingual translation examples. In: Carl M, Way A (eds), pp 255–286

  • Fellbaum C (ed) (1998) WordNet: An electronic lexical database. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Furuse O, Iida H (1992) An Example-based method for transfer-driven machine translation. In: Fourth international conference on theoretical and methodological issues in machine translation: empiricist vs. rationalist methods in MT, TMI-92, Montreal, Canada, pp 139–150

  • Kaji H, Kida Y, Morimoto Y (1992) Learning translation templates from bilingual text. In: Proceedings of the fifteenth [sic] international conference on computational linguistics, COLING-92, Nantes, France, pp 672–678

  • Matsumoto Y, Kitamura M (1995) Acquisition of translation rules from parallel corpora. In: Mitkov R, Nicolov N (eds) Recent advances in natural language processing: Selected papers from the conference. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 405–416

    Google Scholar 

  • McTait K (2003) Translation patterns, linguistic knowledge and complexity in EBMT. In: Carl M, Way A (eds), pp 307–338

  • Nagao M (1984) A framework of a mechanical translation between Japanese and English by analogy principle. In: Elithorn A, Banerji R (eds) Artificial and human intelligence (Edited review papers presented at the international NATO symposium on artificial and human intelligence), North-Holland, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 173–180; repr. In: Nirenburg S, Somers H, Wilks Y (eds) (2003) Readings in machine translation. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 351–354

  • Nomiyama H (1992) Machine translation by case generalization. In: Proceedings of the fifteenth [sic] international conference on computational linguistics, COLING-92, Nantes, France, pp 714–720

  • Papineni K, Roukos S, Ward T, Zhu W-J (2002) Bleu: A method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. In: 40th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Philadelphia, PA, pp 311–318

  • Pollard C, Sag I (1994) Head-driven phrase structure grammar. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

    Google Scholar 

  • Resnik P (1995) Using information content to evaluate semantic similarity in a taxonomy. J Artif Intell Res 11: 448–453

    Google Scholar 

  • Somers H (2003) An overview of EBMT. In: Carl M, Way A (eds), pp 3–57

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, Bilkent University, Bilkent, 06800, Ankara, Turkey

    Ilyas Cicekli

Authors
  1. Ilyas Cicekli
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ilyas Cicekli.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Cicekli, I. Inducing translation templates with type constraints. Machine Translation 19, 283–299 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-006-9014-6

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-006-9014-6

Keywords

Search

Navigation