The Long-Term Forecast for Weather Bulletin Translation

Machine Translation (MT) is the focus of extensive scientific investigations driven by regular evaluation campaigns, but which are mostly oriented towards a somewhat particular task: translating news articles into English. In this paper, we investigate how well current MT approaches deal with a real-world task. We have rationally reconstructed one of the only MT systems in daily use which produces high-quality translation: the Météo system. We show how a combination of a sentence-based memory approach, a phrase-based statistical engine and a neural-network rescorer can give results comparable to those of the current system. We also explore another possible prospect for MT technology: the translation of weather alerts, which are currently being translated manually by translators at the Canadian Translation Bureau.

[1]  Ehud Reiter,et al.  Book Reviews: Building Natural Language Generation Systems , 2000, CL.

[2]  J. Thompson,et al.  CLUSTAL W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice. , 1994, Nucleic acids research.

[3]  Samy Bengio,et al.  Torch: a modular machine learning software library , 2002 .

[4]  Kathryn B. Taylor,et al.  Machine Translation: From Real Users to Research , 2004, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[5]  Andreas Stolcke,et al.  SRILM - an extensible language modeling toolkit , 2002, INTERSPEECH.

[6]  Wolfgang Wahlster,et al.  Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation , 2000, Artificial Intelligence.

[7]  Harold L. Somers,et al.  An introduction to machine translation , 1992 .

[8]  Robert L. Mercer,et al.  The Mathematics of Statistical Machine Translation: Parameter Estimation , 1993, CL.

[9]  Srinivas Bangalore,et al.  Bootstrapping Bilingual Data using Consensus Translation for a Multilingual Instant Messaging System , 2002, COLING.

[10]  Giuseppe Riccardi,et al.  Computing consensus translation from multiple machine translation systems , 2001, IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, 2001. ASRU '01..

[11]  Yaser Al-Onaizan,et al.  A primer on finite-state software for natural language processing , 1999 .

[12]  Philippe Langlais,et al.  Weather report translation using a translation memory , 2004, AMTA.

[13]  John Newton.  Computers in translation : a practical appraisal , 1992 .

[14]  Sergei Nirenburg,et al.  Three Heads are Better than One , 1994, ANLP.

[15]  Robert Dale,et al.  Building Natural Language Generation Systems: Figures , 2000 .

[16]  R. Rosenfeld,et al.  Two decades of statistical language modeling: where do we go from here? , 2000, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[17]  Taro Watanabe,et al.  Reordering Constraints for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation , 2004, COLING.

[18]  George F. Foster,et al.  Confidence estimation for translation prediction , 2003, CoNLL.

[19]  Richard I. Kittredge,et al.  Using natural-language processing to produce weather forecasts , 1994, IEEE Expert.

[20]  Hermann Ney,et al.  Improvements in Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation , 2004, NAACL.

[21]  Marti A. Hearst,et al.  HLT-NAACL 2003 : Human Language Technology conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics : proceedings of the main conference : May 27 to June 1, 2003, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada , 2003 .

[22]  Alexander M. Fraser,et al.  A Smorgasbord of Features for Statistical Machine Translation , 2004, NAACL.

[23]  H. Ney,et al.  A novel string-to-string distance measure with applications to machine translation evaluation , 2003, MTSUMMIT.

[24]  Salim Roukos,et al.  Bleu: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation , 2002, ACL.

[25]  Andy Way,et al.  Recent Advances in Example-Based Machine Translation , 2004 .

[26]  Hermann Ney,et al.  Alignment templates: the RWTH SMT system , 2004, IWSLT.

[27]  Alex Kulesza,et al.  Confidence Estimation for Machine Translation , 2004, COLING.

[28]  Daniel Marcu,et al.  Statistical Phrase-Based Translation , 2003, NAACL.

[29]  Alexander H. Waibel,et al.  Phrase Pair Rescoring with Term Weighting for Statistical Machine Translation , 2004, EMNLP.

[30]  Alain Polguère,et al.  Synthesizing Weather Forecasts from Formatted Data , 1986, COLING.

[31]  Hermann Ney,et al.  Improved Statistical Alignment Models , 2000, ACL.

[32]  Alon Lavie,et al.  Multi-engine machine translation guided by explicit word matching , 2005, EAMT.

[33]  Alexander H. Waibel,et al.  The ISL statistical translation system for spoken language translation , 2004, IWSLT.

[34]  Noriko Kando,et al.  Overview of the IWSLT04 evaluation campaign , 2004, IWSLT.

[35]  José Coch.  System Demonstration Interactive Generation And Knowledge Administration In Multimeteo , 1998, INLG.

[36]  John Chandioux.  METEO: An Operational Translation System , 1988, RIAO.

[37]  George R. Doddington,et al.  Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation Quality Using N-gram Co-Occurrence Statistics , 2002 .

[38]  W. J. Hutchins.  Machine Translation: Past, Present, Future , 1986 .