Controlling Utterance Length in NMT-based Word Segmentation with Attention

Pierre Godard, Laurent Besacier, François Yvon


Abstract
One of the basic tasks of computational language documentation (CLD) is to identify word boundaries in an unsegmented phonemic stream. While several unsupervised monolingual word segmentation algorithms exist in the literature, they are challenged in real-world CLD settings by the small amount of available data. A possible remedy is to take advantage of glosses or translation in a foreign, well- resourced, language, which often exist for such data. In this paper, we explore and compare ways to exploit neural machine translation models to perform unsupervised boundary detection with bilingual information, notably introducing a new loss function for jointly learning alignment and segmentation. We experiment with an actual under-resourced language, Mboshi, and show that these techniques can effectively control the output segmentation length.
Anthology ID:
2019.iwslt-1.30
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation
Month:
November 2-3
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong
Editors:
Jan Niehues, Rolando Cattoni, Sebastian Stüker, Matteo Negri, Marco Turchi, Thanh-Le Ha, Elizabeth Salesky, Ramon Sanabria, Loic Barrault, Lucia Specia, Marcello Federico
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2019.iwslt-1.30
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pierre Godard, Laurent Besacier, and François Yvon. 2019. Controlling Utterance Length in NMT-based Word Segmentation with Attention. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation, Hong Kong. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Controlling Utterance Length in NMT-based Word Segmentation with Attention (Godard et al., IWSLT 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2019.iwslt-1.30.pdf