Despite their progress in high-resource language settings, unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction (UBLI) models often fail on corpora with low-resource distant language pairs due to insufficient initialization. In this work, we propose a cross-lingual feature extraction (CFE) method to learn the cross-lingual features from monolingual corpora for low-resource UBLI, enabling representations of words with the same meaning leveraged by the initialization step. By integrating cross-lingual representations with pre-trained word embeddings in a fully unsupervised initialization on UBLI, the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on low-resource language pairs (EN-VI, EN-TH, EN-ZH, EN-JA). The ablation study also proves that the learned cross-lingual features can enhance the representational ability and robustness of the existing embedding model.

We introduce a distribution based model to learn bilingual word embeddings from monolingual data. It is simple, effective and does not require any parallel data or any seed lexicon. We take advantage of the fact that word embeddings are usually in form of dense real-valued low-dimensional vector and therefore the distribution of them can be accurately estimated. A novel cross-lingual learning objective is proposed which directly matches the distributions of word embeddings in one language with that in the other language. During the joint learning process, we dynamically estimate the distributions of word embeddings in two languages respectively and minimize the dissimilarity between them through standard back propagation algorithm. Our learned bilingual word embeddings allow to group each word and its translations together in the shared vector space. We demonstrate the utility of the learned embeddings on the task of finding word-to-word translations from monolingual corpora. Our model achieved encouraging performance on data in both related languages and substantially different languages.

In this paper, we describe HIT-LTRC's participation in the IWSLT 2012 evaluation campaign. In this year, we took part in the Olympics Task which required the participants to translate Chinese to English with limited data. Our system is based on Moses[1], which is an open source machine translation system. We mainly used the phrase-based models to carry out our experiments, and factored-based models were also performed in comparison. All the involved tools are freely available. In the evaluation campaign, we focus on data selection, phrase extraction method comparison and phrase table combination.

This paper describes the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology/Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (NICT/ATR) statistical machine translation (SMT) system used for the IWSLT 2008 evaluation campaign. We participated in the Chinese–English (Challenge Task), English–Chinese (Challenge Task), Chinese–English (BTEC Task), Chinese–Spanish (BTEC Task), and Chinese–English–Spanish (PIVOT Task) translation tasks. In the English–Chinese translation Challenge Task, we focused on exploring various factors for the English–Chinese translation because the research on the translation of English–Chinese is scarce compared to the opposite direction. In the Chinese–English translation Challenge Task, we employed a novel clustering method, where training sentences similar to the development data in terms of the word error rate formed a cluster. In the pivot translation task, we integrated two strategies for pivot translation by linear interpolation.