Xerox Corporation

National Research Council of Canada

Cyril Goutte

Eric Gaussier

Jean-Michel Renders

Michel Simard

Marc Dymetman

Nicola Cancedda

Caroline Privault

Kenji Yamada

Francois Pacull

Irina Matveeva

Roland Kuhn

Bruno Cavestro

Pierre Isabelle

Massih Amini

Arne Mauser

This application is related to a means and a method for facilitating the use of translation memories by aligning words of an input source language sentence with the correspondent translated words in target language sentence. More specifically, this invention relates to such a means and method where there is an enhanced translation memory comprising an alignment function.

Method and system for using alignment means in matching translation

The present document describes a method and a system for generating classifiers from multilingual corpora including subsets of content-equivalent documents written in different languages. When the documents are translations of each other, their classifications must be substantially the same. Embodiments of the invention utilize this similarity in order to enhance the accuracy of the classification in one language based on the classification results in the other language, and vice versa. A system in accordance with the present embodiments implements a method which comprises generating a first classifier from a first subset of the corpora in a first language; generating a second classifier from a second subset of the corpora in a second language; and re-training each of the classifiers on its respective subset based on the classification results of the other classifier, until a training cost between the classification results produced by subsequent iterations reaches a local minima.

Text categorization based on co-classification learning from multilingual corpora

A probabilistic document categorizer has an associated vocabulary of words and an associated plurality of probabilistic categorizer parameters derived from a collection of documents. A new document is received. The probabilistic categorizer parameters are updated to reflect addition of the new document to the collection of documents based on vocabulary words contained in the new document, a category of the new document, and a collection size parameter indicative of an effective total number of instances of vocabulary words in the collection of documents.

Incremental training for probabilistic categorizer

A class is to be characterized of a probabilistic classifier or clustering system that includes probabilistic model parameters. For each of a plurality of candidate words or word combinations, divergence of the class from other classes is computed based on one or more probabilistic model parameters profiling the candidate word or word combination. One or more words or word combinations are selected for characterizing the class as those candidate words or word combinations for which the class has substantial computed divergence from the other classes.

Class description generation for clustering and categorization

A probabilistic clustering system is defined at least in part by probabilistic model parameters indicative of word counts, ratios, or frequencies characterizing classes of the clustering system. An association of one or more documents in the probabilistic clustering system is changed from one or more source classes to one or more destination classes. Probabilistic model parameters characterizing classes affected by the changed association are locally updated without updating probabilistic model parameters characterizing classes not affected by the changed association.

Hierarchical clustering with real-time updating

Methods are disclosed for performing proper word alignment that satisfy constraints of coverage and transitive closure. Initially, a translation matrix which defines word association measures between source and target words of a corpus of bilingual translations of source and target sentences is computed. Subsequently, in a first method, the association measures in the translation matrix are factorized and orthogonalized to produce cepts for the source and target words, which resulting matrix factors may then be, optionally, multiplied to produce an alignment matrix. In a second method, the association measures in the translation matrix are thresholded, and then closed by transitivity, to produce an alignment matrix, which may then be, optionally, factorized to produce cepts. The resulting cepts or alignment matrices may then be used by any number of natural language applications for identifying words that are properly aligned.

Apparatus and methods for aligning words in bilingual sentences

In categorizing an object respective to at least two categorization dimensions each defined by a plurality of categories, a probability value indicative of the object is determined for each category of each categorization dimension. A categorization label for the object is selected respective to each categorization dimension based on (i) the determined probability values of the categories of that categorization dimension and (ii) the determined probability values of categories of at least one other of the at least two categorization dimensions.

Categorization including dependencies between different category systems

Various methods formulated using a geometric interpretation for identifying bilingual pairs in comparable corpora using a bilingual dictionary are disclosed. The methods may be used separately or in combination to compute the similarity between bilingual pairs.

Methods and apparatuses for identifying bilingual lexicons in comparable corpora using geometric processing

A machine translation method includes receiving source text in a first language and retrieving text fragments in a target language from a library of bi-fragments to generate a target hypothesis. Each bi-fragment includes a text fragment from the first language and a corresponding text fragment from the second language. Some of the bi-fragments are modeled as elastic bi-fragments where a gap between words is able to assume a variable size corresponding to a number of other words to occupy the gap. The target hypothesis is evaluated with a translation scoring function which scores the target hypothesis according to a plurality of feature functions, at least one of the feature functions comprising a gap size scoring feature which favors hypotheses with statistically more probable gap sizes over hypotheses with statically less probable gap sizes.

Machine translation using elastic chunks

A machine translation method for translating source text from a first language to target text in a second language includes receiving the source text in the first language and accessing a library of bi-fragments, each of the bi-fragments including a text fragment from the first language and a text fragment from the second language, at least some of the bi-fragments comprising non-contiguous bi-fragments in which at least one of the text fragment from the first language and the text fragment from the second language comprises a non-contiguous fragment.

Machine translation using non-contiguous fragments of text

Feature selection is used to determine feature influence for a given categorization decision to identify those features in a categorized document that were important in classifying the document into one or more classes. In one embodiment, model parameters of a categorization model are used to determine the features that contributed to the categorization decision of a document. In another embodiment, the model parameters of the categorization model and the features of the categorized document are used to determine the features that contributed to the categorization decision of a document.

Method and apparatus for explaining categorization decisions

A method of categorizing objects in which there can be multiple categories of objects and each object can belong to more than one category is described. The method defines a set of categories in which at least one category is dependent on another category and then organizes the categories in a hierarchy that embodies any dependencies among them. Each object is assigned to one or more categories in the set. A set of labels corresponding to all combinations of any number of the categories is defined, wherein if an object is relevant to several categories, the object must be assigned the label corresponding to the subset of all relevant categories. Once the new labels are defined, the multi-category, multi-label problem has been reduced to a multi-category, single-label problem, and the categorization task is reduced down to choosing the single best label set for an object.

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Le Versoud, France

Cyril Goutte