Radu Soricut


2023

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MaXM: Towards Multilingual Visual Question Answering
Soravit Changpinyo | Linting Xue | Michal Yarom | Ashish Thapliyal | Idan Szpektor | Julien Amelot | Xi Chen | Radu Soricut
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Visual Question Answering (VQA) has been primarily studied through the lens of the English language. Yet, tackling VQA in other languages in the same manner would require a considerable amount of resources. In this paper, we propose scalable solutions to multilingual visual question answering (mVQA), on both data and modeling fronts. We first propose a translation-based framework to mVQA data generation that requires much less human annotation efforts than the conventional approach of directly collection questions and answers. Then, we apply our framework to the multilingual captions in the Crossmodal-3600 dataset and develop an efficient annotation protocol to create MaXM, a test-only VQA benchmark in 7 diverse languages. Finally, we develop a simple, lightweight, and effective approach as well as benchmark state-of-the-art English and multilingual VQA models. We hope that our benchmark encourages further research on mVQA.

2022

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End-to-end Dense Video Captioning as Sequence Generation
Wanrong Zhu | Bo Pang | Ashish V. Thapliyal | William Yang Wang | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Dense video captioning aims to identify the events of interest in an input video, and generate descriptive captions for each event. Previous approaches usually follow a two-stage generative process, which first proposes a segment for each event, then renders a caption for each identified segment. Recent advances in large-scale sequence generation pretraining have seen great success in unifying task formulation for a great variety of tasks, but so far, more complex tasks such as dense video captioning are not able to fully utilize this powerful paradigm. In this work, we show how to model the two subtasks of dense video captioning jointly as one sequence generation task, and simultaneously predict the events and the corresponding descriptions. Experiments on YouCook2 and ViTT show encouraging results and indicate the feasibility of training complex tasks such as end-to-end dense video captioning integrated into large-scale pretrained models.

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Denoising Large-Scale Image Captioning from Alt-text Data Using Content Selection Models
Khyathi Raghavi Chandu | Piyush Sharma | Soravit Changpinyo | Ashish V. Thapliyal | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Training large-scale image captioning (IC) models demands access to a rich and diverse set of training examples that are expensive to curate both in terms of time and man-power. Instead, alt-text based captions gathered from the web is a far cheaper alternative to scale with the downside of being noisy. Recent modeling approaches to IC often fall short in terms of performance in leveraging these noisy datasets in favor of clean annotations. We address this problem with a simple yet effective technique of breaking down the task into two smaller, more controllable tasks – skeleton prediction and skeleton-based caption generation. Specifically, we show that sub-selecting content words as skeletons helps in generating improved and denoised captions when leveraging rich yet noisy alt-text–based uncurated datasets. We also show that the predicted English skeletons can further cross-lingually be leveraged to generate non-English captions, and present experimental results covering caption generation in French, Italian, German, Spanish and Hindi. We also show that skeleton-based prediction allows for better control of certain caption properties, such as length, content, and gender expression, providing a handle to perform human-in-the-loop interpretable semi-automatic corrections.

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All You May Need for VQA are Image Captions
Soravit Changpinyo | Doron Kukliansy | Idan Szpektor | Xi Chen | Nan Ding | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Visual Question Answering (VQA) has benefited from increasingly sophisticated models, but has not enjoyed the same level of engagement in terms of data creation. In this paper, we propose a method that automatically derives VQA examples at volume, by leveraging the abundance of existing image-caption annotations combined with neural models for textual question generation. We show that the resulting data is of high-quality. VQA models trained on our data improve state-of-the-art zero-shot accuracy by double digits and achieve a level of robustness that lacks in the same model trained on human-annotated VQA data.

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Crossmodal-3600: A Massively Multilingual Multimodal Evaluation Dataset
Ashish V. Thapliyal | Jordi Pont Tuset | Xi Chen | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Research in massively multilingual image captioning has been severely hampered by a lack of high-quality evaluation datasets. In this paper we present the Crossmodal-3600 dataset (XM3600 in short), a geographically diverse set of 3600 images annotated with human-generated reference captions in 36 languages. The images were selected from across the world, covering regions where the 36 languages are spoken, and annotated with captions that achieve consistency in terms of style across all languages, while avoiding annotation artifacts due to direct translation. We apply this benchmark to model selection for massively multilingual image captioning models, and show superior correlation results with human evaluations when using XM3600 as golden references for automatic metrics.

2021

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COSMic: A Coherence-Aware Generation Metric for Image Descriptions
Mert Inan | Piyush Sharma | Baber Khalid | Radu Soricut | Matthew Stone | Malihe Alikhani
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Developers of text generation models rely on automated evaluation metrics as a stand-in for slow and expensive manual evaluations. However, image captioning metrics have struggled to give accurate learned estimates of the semantic and pragmatic success of output text. We address this weakness by introducing the first discourse-aware learned generation metric for evaluating image descriptions. Our approach is inspired by computational theories of discourse for capturing information goals using coherence. We present a dataset of image–description pairs annotated with coherence relations. We then train a coherence-aware metric on a subset of the Conceptual Captions dataset and measure its effectiveness—its ability to predict human ratings of output captions—on a test set composed of out-of-domain images. We demonstrate a higher Kendall Correlation Coefficient for our proposed metric with the human judgments for the results of a number of state-of-the-art coherence-aware caption generation models when compared to several other metrics including recently proposed learned metrics such as BLEURT and BERTScore.

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Understanding Guided Image Captioning Performance across Domains
Edwin G. Ng | Bo Pang | Piyush Sharma | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

Image captioning models generally lack the capability to take into account user interest, and usually default to global descriptions that try to balance readability, informativeness, and information overload. We present a Transformer-based model with the ability to produce captions focused on specific objects, concepts or actions in an image by providing them as guiding text to the model. Further, we evaluate the quality of these guided captions when trained on Conceptual Captions which contain 3.3M image-level captions compared to Visual Genome which contain 3.6M object-level captions. Counter-intuitively, we find that guided captions produced by the model trained on Conceptual Captions generalize better on out-of-domain data. Our human-evaluation results indicate that attempting in-the-wild guided image captioning requires access to large, unrestricted-domain training datasets, and that increased style diversity (even without increasing the number of unique tokens) is a key factor for improved performance.

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CrossVQA: Scalably Generating Benchmarks for Systematically Testing VQA Generalization
Arjun Akula | Soravit Changpinyo | Boqing Gong | Piyush Sharma | Song-Chun Zhu | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

One challenge in evaluating visual question answering (VQA) models in the cross-dataset adaptation setting is that the distribution shifts are multi-modal, making it difficult to identify if it is the shifts in visual or language features that play a key role. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic framework for generating disentangled shifts by introducing a controllable visual question-answer generation (VQAG) module that is capable of generating highly-relevant and diverse question-answer pairs with the desired dataset style. We use it to create CrossVQA, a collection of test splits for assessing VQA generalization based on the VQA2, VizWiz, and Open Images datasets. We provide an analysis of our generated datasets and demonstrate its utility by using them to evaluate several state-of-the-art VQA systems. One important finding is that the visual shifts in cross-dataset VQA matter more than the language shifts. More broadly, we present a scalable framework for systematically evaluating the machine with little human intervention.

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Quality Estimation for Image Captions Based on Large-scale Human Evaluations
Tomer Levinboim | Ashish V. Thapliyal | Piyush Sharma | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Automatic image captioning has improved significantly over the last few years, but the problem is far from being solved, with state of the art models still often producing low quality captions when used in the wild. In this paper, we focus on the task of Quality Estimation (QE) for image captions, which attempts to model the caption quality from a human perspective and *without* access to ground-truth references, so that it can be applied at prediction time to detect low-quality captions produced on *previously unseen images*. For this task, we develop a human evaluation process that collects coarse-grained caption annotations from crowdsourced users, which is then used to collect a large scale dataset spanning more than 600k caption quality ratings. We then carefully validate the quality of the collected ratings and establish baseline models for this new QE task. Finally, we further collect fine-grained caption quality annotations from trained raters, and use them to demonstrate that QE models trained over the coarse ratings can effectively detect and filter out low-quality image captions, thereby improving the user experience from captioning systems.

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H-Transformer-1D: Fast One-Dimensional Hierarchical Attention for Sequences
Zhenhai Zhu | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We describe an efficient hierarchical method to compute attention in the Transformer architecture. The proposed attention mechanism exploits a matrix structure similar to the Hierarchical Matrix (H-Matrix) developed by the numerical analysis community, and has linear run time and memory complexity. We perform extensive experiments to show that the inductive bias embodied by our hierarchical attention is effective in capturing the hierarchical structure in the sequences typical for natural language and vision tasks. Our method is superior to alternative sub-quadratic proposals by over +6 points on average on the Long Range Arena benchmark. It also sets a new SOTA test perplexity on One-Billion Word dataset with 5x fewer model parameters than that of the previous-best Transformer-based models.

2020

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Improving Text Generation Evaluation with Batch Centering and Tempered Word Mover Distance
Xi Chen | Nan Ding | Tomer Levinboim | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Systems

Recent advances in automatic evaluation metrics for text have shown that deep contextualized word representations, such as those generated by BERT encoders, are helpful for designing metrics that correlate well with human judgements. At the same time, it has been argued that contextualized word representations exhibit sub-optimal statistical properties for encoding the true similarity between words or sentences. In this paper, we present two techniques for improving encoding representations for similarity metrics: a batch-mean centering strategy that improves statistical properties; and a computationally efficient tempered Word Mover Distance, for better fusion of the information in the contextualized word representations. We conduct numerical experiments that demonstrate the robustness of our techniques, reporting results over various BERT-backbone learned metrics and achieving state of the art correlation with human ratings on several benchmarks.

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TeaForN: Teacher-Forcing with N-grams
Sebastian Goodman | Nan Ding | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Sequence generation models trained with teacher-forcing suffer from issues related to exposure bias and lack of differentiability across timesteps. Our proposed method, Teacher-Forcing with N-grams (TeaForN), addresses both these problems directly, through the use of a stack of N decoders trained to decode along a secondary time axis that allows model-parameter updates based on N prediction steps. TeaForN can be used with a wide class of decoder architectures and requires minimal modifications from a standard teacher-forcing setup. Empirically, we show that TeaForN boosts generation quality on one Machine Translation benchmark, WMT 2014 English-French, and two News Summarization benchmarks, CNN/Dailymail and Gigaword.

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Beyond Instructional Videos: Probing for More Diverse Visual-Textual Grounding on YouTube
Jack Hessel | Zhenhai Zhu | Bo Pang | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Pretraining from unlabelled web videos has quickly become the de-facto means of achieving high performance on many video understanding tasks. Features are learned via prediction of grounded relationships between visual content and automatic speech recognition (ASR) tokens. However, prior pretraining work has been limited to only instructional videos; a priori, we expect this domain to be relatively “easy:” speakers in instructional videos will often reference the literal objects/actions being depicted. We ask: can similar models be trained on more diverse video corpora? And, if so, what types of videos are “grounded” and what types are not? We fit a representative pretraining model to the diverse YouTube8M dataset, and study its success and failure cases. We find that visual-textual grounding is indeed possible across previously unexplored video categories, and that pretraining on a more diverse set results in representations that generalize to both non-instructional and instructional domains.

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Multimodal Pretraining for Dense Video Captioning
Gabriel Huang | Bo Pang | Zhenhai Zhu | Clara Rivera | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

Learning specific hands-on skills such as cooking, car maintenance, and home repairs increasingly happens via instructional videos. The user experience with such videos is known to be improved by meta-information such as time-stamped annotations for the main steps involved. Generating such annotations automatically is challenging, and we describe here two relevant contributions. First, we construct and release a new dense video captioning dataset, Video Timeline Tags (ViTT), featuring a variety of instructional videos together with time-stamped annotations. Second, we explore several multimodal sequence-to-sequence pretraining strategies that leverage large unsupervised datasets of videos and caption-like texts. We pretrain and subsequently finetune dense video captioning models using both YouCook2 and ViTT. We show that such models generalize well and are robust over a wide variety of instructional videos.

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Cross-modal Language Generation using Pivot Stabilization for Web-scale Language Coverage
Ashish V. Thapliyal | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Cross-modal language generation tasks such as image captioning are directly hurt in their ability to support non-English languages by the trend of data-hungry models combined with the lack of non-English annotations. We investigate potential solutions for combining existing language-generation annotations in English with translation capabilities in order to create solutions at web-scale in both domain and language coverage. We describe an approach called Pivot-Language Generation Stabilization (PLuGS), which leverages directly at training time both existing English annotations (gold data) as well as their machine-translated versions (silver data); at run-time, it generates first an English caption and then a corresponding target-language caption. We show that PLuGS models outperform other candidate solutions in evaluations performed over 5 different target languages, under a large-domain testset using images from the Open Images dataset. Furthermore, we find an interesting effect where the English captions generated by the PLuGS models are better than the captions generated by the original, monolingual English model.

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Cross-modal Coherence Modeling for Caption Generation
Malihe Alikhani | Piyush Sharma | Shengjie Li | Radu Soricut | Matthew Stone
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We use coherence relations inspired by computational models of discourse to study the information needs and goals of image captioning. Using an annotation protocol specifically devised for capturing image–caption coherence relations, we annotate 10,000 instances from publicly-available image–caption pairs. We introduce a new task for learning inferences in imagery and text, coherence relation prediction, and show that these coherence annotations can be exploited to learn relation classifiers as an intermediary step, and also train coherence-aware, controllable image captioning models. The results show a dramatic improvement in the consistency and quality of the generated captions with respect to information needs specified via coherence relations.

2019

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Informative Image Captioning with External Sources of Information
Sanqiang Zhao | Piyush Sharma | Tomer Levinboim | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

An image caption should fluently present the essential information in a given image, including informative, fine-grained entity mentions and the manner in which these entities interact. However, current captioning models are usually trained to generate captions that only contain common object names, thus falling short on an important “informativeness” dimension. We present a mechanism for integrating image information together with fine-grained labels (assumed to be generated by some upstream models) into a caption that describes the image in a fluent and informative manner. We introduce a multimodal, multi-encoder model based on Transformer that ingests both image features and multiple sources of entity labels. We demonstrate that we can learn to control the appearance of these entity labels in the output, resulting in captions that are both fluent and informative.

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A Case Study on Combining ASR and Visual Features for Generating Instructional Video Captions
Jack Hessel | Bo Pang | Zhenhai Zhu | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)

Instructional videos get high-traffic on video sharing platforms, and prior work suggests that providing time-stamped, subtask annotations (e.g., “heat the oil in the pan”) improves user experiences. However, current automatic annotation methods based on visual features alone perform only slightly better than constant prediction. Taking cues from prior work, we show that we can improve performance significantly by considering automatic speech recognition (ASR) tokens as input. Furthermore, jointly modeling ASR tokens and visual features results in higher performance compared to training individually on either modality. We find that unstated background information is better explained by visual features, whereas fine-grained distinctions (e.g., “add oil” vs. “add olive oil”) are disambiguated more easily via ASR tokens.

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Decoupled Box Proposal and Featurization with Ultrafine-Grained Semantic Labels Improve Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering
Soravit Changpinyo | Bo Pang | Piyush Sharma | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Object detection plays an important role in current solutions to vision and language tasks like image captioning and visual question answering. However, popular models like Faster R-CNN rely on a costly process of annotating ground-truths for both the bounding boxes and their corresponding semantic labels, making it less amenable as a primitive task for transfer learning. In this paper, we examine the effect of decoupling box proposal and featurization for down-stream tasks. The key insight is that this allows us to leverage a large amount of labeled annotations that were previously unavailable for standard object detection benchmarks. Empirically, we demonstrate that this leads to effective transfer learning and improved image captioning and visual question answering models, as measured on publicly-available benchmarks.

2018

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Points, Paths, and Playscapes: Large-scale Spatial Language Understanding Tasks Set in the Real World
Jason Baldridge | Tania Bedrax-Weiss | Daphne Luong | Srini Narayanan | Bo Pang | Fernando Pereira | Radu Soricut | Michael Tseng | Yuan Zhang
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding

Spatial language understanding is important for practical applications and as a building block for better abstract language understanding. Much progress has been made through work on understanding spatial relations and values in images and texts as well as on giving and following navigation instructions in restricted domains. We argue that the next big advances in spatial language understanding can be best supported by creating large-scale datasets that focus on points and paths based in the real world, and then extending these to create online, persistent playscapes that mix human and bot players, where the bot players must learn, evolve, and survive according to their depth of understanding of scenes, navigation, and interactions.

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SHAPED: Shared-Private Encoder-Decoder for Text Style Adaptation
Ye Zhang | Nan Ding | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Supervised training of abstractive language generation models results in learning conditional probabilities over language sequences based on the supervised training signal. When the training signal contains a variety of writing styles, such models may end up learning an ‘average’ style that is directly influenced by the training data make-up and cannot be controlled by the needs of an application. We describe a family of model architectures capable of capturing both generic language characteristics via shared model parameters, as well as particular style characteristics via private model parameters. Such models are able to generate language according to a specific learned style, while still taking advantage of their power to model generic language phenomena. Furthermore, we describe an extension that uses a mixture of output distributions from all learned styles to perform on-the-fly style adaptation based on the textual input alone. Experimentally, we find that the proposed models consistently outperform models that encapsulate single-style or average-style language generation capabilities.

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Conceptual Captions: A Cleaned, Hypernymed, Image Alt-text Dataset For Automatic Image Captioning
Piyush Sharma | Nan Ding | Sebastian Goodman | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present a new dataset of image caption annotations, Conceptual Captions, which contains an order of magnitude more images than the MS-COCO dataset (Lin et al., 2014) and represents a wider variety of both images and image caption styles. We achieve this by extracting and filtering image caption annotations from billions of webpages. We also present quantitative evaluations of a number of image captioning models and show that a model architecture based on Inception-ResNetv2 (Szegedy et al., 2016) for image-feature extraction and Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) for sequence modeling achieves the best performance when trained on the Conceptual Captions dataset.

2016

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Morpho-syntactic Lexicon Generation Using Graph-based Semi-supervised Learning
Manaal Faruqui | Ryan McDonald | Radu Soricut
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 4

Morpho-syntactic lexicons provide information about the morphological and syntactic roles of words in a language. Such lexicons are not available for all languages and even when available, their coverage can be limited. We present a graph-based semi-supervised learning method that uses the morphological, syntactic and semantic relations between words to automatically construct wide coverage lexicons from small seed sets. Our method is language-independent, and we show that we can expand a 1000 word seed lexicon to more than 100 times its size with high quality for 11 languages. In addition, the automatically created lexicons provide features that improve performance in two downstream tasks: morphological tagging and dependency parsing.

2015

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Unsupervised Morphology Induction Using Word Embeddings
Radu Soricut | Franz Och
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2014

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Findings of the 2014 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
Ondřej Bojar | Christian Buck | Christian Federmann | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn | Johannes Leveling | Christof Monz | Pavel Pecina | Matt Post | Herve Saint-Amand | Radu Soricut | Lucia Specia | Aleš Tamchyna
Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2013

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Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
Ondrej Bojar | Christian Buck | Chris Callison-Burch | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz | Matt Post | Herve Saint-Amand | Radu Soricut | Lucia Specia
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Findings of the 2013 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
Ondřej Bojar | Christian Buck | Chris Callison-Burch | Christian Federmann | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz | Matt Post | Radu Soricut | Lucia Specia
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2012

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Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
Chris Callison-Burch | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz | Matt Post | Radu Soricut | Lucia Specia
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Findings of the 2012 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
Chris Callison-Burch | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz | Matt Post | Radu Soricut | Lucia Specia
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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The SDL Language Weaver Systems in the WMT12 Quality Estimation Shared Task
Radu Soricut | Nguyen Bach | Ziyuan Wang
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Combining Quality Prediction and System Selection for Improved Automatic Translation Output
Radu Soricut | Sushant Narsale
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2010

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TrustRank: Inducing Trust in Automatic Translations via Ranking
Radu Soricut | Abdessamad Echihabi
Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2008

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Automatic Prediction of Parser Accuracy
Sujith Ravi | Kevin Knight | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2006

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Stochastic Language Generation Using WIDL-Expressions and its Application in Machine Translation and Summarization
Radu Soricut | Daniel Marcu
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Discourse Generation Using Utility-Trained Coherence Models
Radu Soricut | Daniel Marcu
Proceedings of the COLING/ACL 2006 Main Conference Poster Sessions

2005

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Towards Developing Generation Algorithms for Text-to-Text Applications
Radu Soricut | Daniel Marcu
Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’05)

2004

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A Unified Framework For Automatic Evaluation Using 4-Gram Co-occurrence Statistics
Radu Soricut | Eric Brill
Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-04)

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Automatic Question Answering: Beyond the Factoid
Radu Soricut | Eric Brill
Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: HLT-NAACL 2004

2003

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Sentence Level Discourse Parsing using Syntactic and Lexical Information
Radu Soricut | Daniel Marcu
Proceedings of the 2003 Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2002

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Using a large monolingual corpus to improve translation accuracy
Radu Soricut | Kevin Knight | Daniel Marcu
Proceedings of the 5th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers

The existence of a phrase in a large monolingual corpus is very useful information, and so is its frequency. We introduce an alternative approach to automatic translation of phrases/sentences that operationalizes this observation. We use a statistical machine translation system to produce alternative translations and a large monolingual corpus to (re)rank these translations. Our results show that this combination yields better translations, especially when translating out-of-domain phrases/sentences. Our approach can be also used to automatically construct parallel corpora from monolingual resources.