AMTA 2008

MT at Work

Proceedings of the

Eighth Conference of the

Association for Machine Translation in the Americas,

Waikiki, Hawai’i, USA

21-25 October 2008

Table of Contents

Prefaces

Preface from the Conference Chair ............................................................................................................................................................................................ iii

Preface from the Program Chairs ................................................................................................................................................................................................ iv

Conference Organizers & AMTA Board of Directors ............................................................................................................................................................ vii

Keynote Presentations

The Triple-Advantage Factor of MT: Cost, Time-to-Market, and FAUT

Will Burgett & Julie Chang, Intel Corporation ............................................................................................................................................................................ 1

Bringing humans into the loop: Localization with MT at Traslán

Declan Groves, Traslán Translation Technology ..................................................................................................................................................................... 11

Machine Translation 2008: Science meets Solution

Mark Tapling, Language Weaver ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 23

MT Research

Spanish-to-Basque MultiEngine Machine Translation for a Restricted Domain

Iñaki Alegria, Arantza Casillas, Arantza Diaz de Ilarraza, Jon Igartua, Gorka Labaka, Mikel Lersundi, Aingeru

Mayor & Kepa Sarasola, University of the Basque Country .................................................................................................................................................. 37

Exploiting Document-Level Context for Data-Driven Machine Translation

Ralf Brown, Carnegie-Mellon ........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 46

Shallow-Syntax Phrase-Based Translation: Joint versus Factored String-to-Chunk Models

Mauro Cettolo, Marcello Federico, Daniele Pighin & Nicola Bertoldi, Fondazione Bruno Kessler ................................................................................... 56

Discriminative, Syntactic Language Modeling through Latent SVMs

Colin Cherry & Chris Quirk, Microsoft Research ........................................................................................................................................................................ 65

Translation universals: do they exist? A corpus-based NLP study of convergence and simplification

Gloria Corpas Pastor, Ruslan Mitkov, Naveed Afzal, & Viktor Pekar, University of Málaga/University of Wolverhampton/OUP …........................ 75

Computing multiple weighted reordering hypotheses for a phrase-based statistical machine translation system

Marta R. Costa-jussà & José A. R. Fonollosa, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya .......................................................................................................... 82

Overcoming Vocabulary Sparsity in MT Using Lattices

Steve DeNeefe, Ulf Hermjakob & Kevin Knight, University of Southern California/ISI ..................................................................................................... 89

Toward the Evaluation of Machine Translation Using Patent Information

Atsushi Fujii, Masao Utiyama, Mikio Yamamoto & Takehito Utsuro, University of Tsukuba .......................................................................................... 97

Automatic Learning of Morphological Variations for Handling Out-of-Vocabulary Terms in Urdu-English MT

Nizar Habash & Hayden Metsky, Columbia University ........................................................................................................................................................... 107

A Generalized Reordering Model for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation

Yanqing He & Chengqing Zong, Chinese Academy of Sciences ............................................................................................................................................ 117

A truly multilingual, high coverage, accurate, yet simple, subsentential alignment method

Adrien Lardilleux & Yves Lepage, Université de Caen .............................................................................................................................................................. 125

Large-scale Discriminative n-gram Language Models for Statistical Machine Translation

Zhifei Li & Sanjeev Khudanpur, Nanyang Technological University of Singapore ............................................................................................................. 133

Are Multiple Reference Translations Necessary? Investigating the Value of Paraphrased Reference Translations in Parameter Optimization

Nitin Madnani, Philip Resnik, Bonnie J. Dorr & Richard Schwartz, University of Maryland .............................................................................................. 143

Integrating a Phrase-based SMT Model and a Bilingual Lexicon for Semi-Automatic Acquisition of Technical Term Translation Lexicons

Yohei Morishita, Takehito Utsuro & Mikio Yamamoto, University of Tsukuba ................................................................................................................... 153

Linguistically-motivated Tree-based Probabilistic Phrase Alignment

Toshiaki Nakazawa & Sadao Kurohashi, Univeristy of Tokyo/Kyoto University ............................................................................................................... 163

Parsers as language models for statistical machine translation

Matt Post & Daniel Gildea, University of Rochester .................................................................................................................................................................. 172

A Statistical Analysis of Automated MT Evaluation Metrics for Assessments in Task-Based MT Evaluation

Calandra R. Tate, Army Research Laboratory ............................................................................................................................................................................ 182

Wider Pipelines: N-Best Alignments and Parses in MT Training

Ashish Venugopal, Andreas Zollmann, Noah A. Smith & Stephan Vogel, Carnegie-Mellon University........................................................................... 192

Improving English-to-Chinese Translation for Technical Terms using Morphological Information

Xianchao Wu, Naoaki Okazaki, Takashi Tsunakawa & Jun'ichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo ............................................................................................. 202

Mining the Web for Domain-Specific Translations

Jian-Cheng Wu, Peter Wei-Huai Hsu, Chiung-Hui Tseng & Jason S. Chang, National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan ............................................. 212

Two-Stage Translation: A Combined Linguistic and Statistical Machine Translation Framework

Yushi Xu & Stephanie Seneff, MIT/CSAIL ................................................................................................................................................................................. 222

Student Research Workshop

Improving Syntax-Driven Translation Models by Re-structuring Divergent and Nonisomorphic Parse Tree Structures

Vamshi Ambati & Alon Lavie, Carnegie Mellon/LTI ................................................................................................................................................................ 235

Using Bilingual Chinese-English Word Alignments to Resolve PP-attachment Ambiguity in English

Victoria Fossum & Kevin Knight, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor/USC ISI................................................................................................................... 245

Combination of Machine Translation Systems via Hypothesis Selection from Combined N-Best Lists

Almut Silja Hildebrand & Stephan Vogel, Carnegie Mellon/InterACT .................................................................................................................................. 254

The Value of Machine Translation for the Professional Translator

Elina Lagoudaki, Imperial College London .................................................................................................................................................................................. 262

Diacritization as a Machine Translation and as a Sequence Labeling Problem

Tim Schlippe, ThuyLinh Nguyen & Stephan Vogel,Carnegie Mellon/InterACT .................................................................................................................. 270

Multi-Source Translation Methods

Lane Schwartz, University of Minnesota ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 279

Government & Commercial Uses of MT

Machine Translation for Triage and Exploitation of Massive Text Data

James E. Andrews & Kristen Summers, National Ground Intelligence Center ....................................................................................................................... 291

Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN)

Michael Blench, Public Health Agency of Canada .................................................................................................................................................................... 299

Sharing User Dictionaries Across Multiple Systems with UTX-S

Francis Bond, Seiji Okura, Yuji Yamamoto, Toshiki Murata, Kiyotaka Uchimoto, Michael Kato, Miwako

Shimazu & Tsugiyoshi Suzuki, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, et al. ................................................................... 304

Many-to-Many Multilingual Medical Speech Translation on a PDA

Pierrette Bouillon, Glenn Flores, Maria Georgescul, Sonia Halimi, Beth Ann Hockey, Hitoshi Isahara,

Kyoko Kanzaki, Yukie Nakao, Manny Rayner, Marianne Santaholma, Marianne Starlander & Nikos

Tsourakis, University of Geneva/ISSCO, et al. ........................................................................................................................................................................... 314

MT errors in Chinese-to-English MT systems: user feedback

Shin Chang-Meadows, CTWG ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 324

Working with the US Government: Information Resources

Jennifer DeCamp, MITRE .............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 334

Reliable Innovation: A Tecchie's Travels in the Land of Translators

Alain Désilets, Louise Brunette, Christiane Melançon, & Geneviève Patenaude, National Research

Council of Canada/Université du Québec en Outaouais ........................................................................................................................................................... 339

Automated Machine Translation Improvement Through Post-Editing Techniques: Analyst and Translator Experiments

Jennifer Doyon, Christine Doran, C. Donald Means, & Domenique Parr, Abraxas Corp / MITRE .................................................................................... 346

User-centered MT Development and Implementation

Kathleen Egan, Francis Kubala & Allen Sears, TSWG ............................................................................................................................................................... 354

Identifying Common Challenges for Human and Machine Translation: A Case Study from the GALE Program

Lauren Friedman & Stephanie Strassel, Linguistic Data Consortium ..................................................................................................................................... 364

Automatic Translation of Court Judgments

Fabrizio Gotti, Guy Lapalme, Elliott Macklovitch, & Atefeh Farzindar, Université de Montréal/Laboratoire RALI ...................................................... 370

Designing and executing MT workflows through the Kepler Framework

Reginald Hobbs & Clare Voss, ARL ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 380

ClipperRSS: A Light-Weight Prototype for the Cross-language Exploitation of Syndicated Feeds

Rod Holland & Brenden Keyes, MITRE ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 390

Trends in automated translation in today’s global business

Sophie Hurst, SDL International .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 394

Machine Translation for Indonesian and Tagalog

Brianna Laugher & Ben MacLeod, ToggleText ...........................................................................................................................................................................397

Real-time translation of IM Chat

Robert Levin, Transclick ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 402

TransSearch: What are translators looking for?

Elliott Macklovitch, Guy Lapalme & Fabrizio Gotti, Université de Montréal/Laboratoire RALI ....................................................................................... 412

Language Translation Solutions for Community Content

Daniel Marcu, Language Weaver .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 420

The Use of Machine-generated Transcripts during Human Translation

Allison L. Powell & Allison Blodgett, CNRI/CASL ..................................................................................................................................................................... 427

Meeting Army Foreign language Requirements with the Aid of Machine Translation

Cecil MacPherson, Devin Rollis & Irene Zehmisch, USAIC/Fort Huachuca ........................................................................................................................ 435

Hybrid Machine Translation Applied to Media Monitoring

Hassan Sawaf, Braddock Gaskill & Michael Veronis, AppTek .............................................................................................................................................. 440

Artificial Cognitive MT Post-Editing Intelligence

Jörg Schütz, Bioloom Group .......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 448

Language Processing for Analysis and Investigation

Kristen Summers & Diane Chandler, CACI ................................................................................................................................................................................ 454

Embedding Technology at the front end of the Human Translation Workflow: An NVTC Vision

Carol Van Ess-Dykema, Helen G. Gigley, Stephen Lewis & Emily Vancho Bannister, National Virtual Translation Center .....................................457

Applicability of Resource-based Machine Translation to Airplane Manuals

Eiko Yamamoto, Akira Terada, & Hitoshi Isahara, Kobe University ................................................................................................................................... 464

Applications of MT during Olympic Games 2008

Chengqing Zong, Heyan Huang & Shuming Shi, Chinese Academy of Sciences/Hujian Group .................................................................................... 470

Additional papers not in proceedings

Can MT really help the Department of Defense?

Nicholas Bemish

Language Technology Resource Center

Jennifer DeCamp