Empirical methods for compound splitting

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EmpiricalMethodsforCompoundSplitting

PhilippKoehn

InformationSciencesInstitute

DepartmentofComputerScience

UniversityofSouthernCalifornia

koehn@isi.eduKevinKnight

InformationSciencesInstitute

DepartmentofComputerScience

UniversityofSouthernCalifornia

knight@isi.edu

Abstract

Compoundedwordsareachallengefor

NLPapplicationssuchasmachinetrans-

lation(MT).Weintroducemethodsto

learnsplittingrulesfrommonolingual

andparallelcorpora.Weevaluatethem

againstagoldstandardandmeasure

theirimpactonperformanceofstatisti-

calMTsystems.Resultsshowaccuracy

of99.1%andperformancegainsforMT

of0.039BLEUonaGerman-English

nounphrasetranslationtask.

1Introduction

Compoundingofwordsiscommoninanumberof

languages(German,Dutch,Finnish,Greek,etc.).

Sincewordsmaybejoinedfreely,thisvastlyin-

creasesthevocabularysize,leadingtosparsedata

problems.Thisposeschallengesforanumber

ofNLPapplicationssuchasmachinetranslation,

speechrecognition,textclassification,information

extraction,orinformationretrieval.

Formachinetranslation,thesplittingofanun-

knowncompoundintoitspartsenablesthetransla-

tionofthecompoundbythetranslationofitsparts.

TakethewordAktionsplaninGerman(seeFig-

ure1),whichwascreatedbyjoiningthewordsAk-

tionandPlan.Breakingupthiscompoundwould

assistthetranslationintoEnglishasactionplan.

Compoundsplittingisawelldefinedcompu-

tationallinguisticstask.Onewaytodefinethe

goalofcompoundsplittingistobreakupforeignAktionsplan

Aktionsplanactionplan

Akt ionsplanaction plan

act ion plan

Figure1:SplittingoptionsfortheGermanword

Aktionsplan

words,sothataone-to-onecorrespondencetoEn-

glishcanbeestablished.Notethatwearelooking

foraone-to-onecorrespondencetoEnglishcon-

tentwords:Say,thepreferredtranslationofAk-

tionsplanisplanforaction.Thelackofcorre-

spondencefortheEnglishwordfordoesnotde-

tractfromthedefinitionofthetask:Wewould

stillliketobreakuptheGermancompoundinto

thetwopartsAktionandPlan.Theinsertionof

functionwordsisnotourconcern.

Ultimately,thepurposeofthisworkistoim-

provethequalityofmachinetranslationsystems.

Forinstance,phrase-basedtranslationsystems

[MarcuandWong,2002]mayrecovermoreeas-

ilyfromsplittingregimesthatdonotcreatea

one-to-onetranslationcorrespondence.Onesplit-

tingmethodmaymistakenlybreakuptheword

AktionsplanintothethreewordsAkt,Ion,and

Plan.Butifweconsistentlybreakuptheword

AktionintoAktandIoninourtrainingdata,suchasystemwilllikelylearnthetranslationoftheword

pairAktIonintothesingleEnglishwordaction.

Theseconsiderationsleadustothreedifferent

objectivesandthereforethreedifferentevaluation

metricsforthetaskofcompoundsplitting:

One-to-Onecorrespondence

Translationqualitywithaword-basedtrans-

lationsystem

Translationqualitywithaphrase-basedtrans-

lationsystem

Forthefirstobjective,wecomparetheoutput

ofourmethodstoamanuallycreatedgoldstan-

dard.Forthesecondandthird,weprovidediffer-

entlypreparedtrainingcorporatostatisticalma-

chinetranslationsystems.

2RelatedWork

Whilethelinguisticpropertiesofcompoundsare

widelystudied[Langer,1998],therehasbeenonly

limitedworkonempiricalmethodstosplitup

compoundsforspecificapplications.

Brown[2002]proposesaapproachguidedby

aparallelcorpus.Itislimitedtobreakingcom-

poundsintocognatesandwordsfoundinatransla-

tionlexicon.Thislexiconmayalsobeacquiredby

trainingastatisticalmachinetranslationsystem.

Themethodsleadstoimprovedtextcoverageof

anexamplebasedmachinetranslationsystem,but

noresultsontranslationperformancearereported.

MonzanddeRijke[2001]andHedlundetal.

[2001]successfullyuselexiconbasedapproaches

tocompoundsplittingforinformationretrieval.

Compoundsarebrokenintoeitherthesmallestor

thebiggestwordsthatcanbefoundinagivenlex-

icon.

Larsonetal.[2000]proposeadata-driven

methodthatcombinescompoundsplittingand

wordrecombinationforspeechrecognition.While

itreducesthenumberofout-of-vocabularywords,

itdoesnotimprovespeechrecognitionaccuracy.

MorphologicalanalyzerssuchasMorphix[Fin-

klerandNeumann,1998]usuallyprovideavariety

ofsplittingoptionsandleaveittothesubsequent

applicationtopickthebestchoice.3SplittingOptions

Compoundsarecreatedbyjoiningexistingwords

together.Thus,toenumerateallpossiblesplittings

ofacompound,weconsiderallsplitsintoknown

words.Knownwordsarewordsthatexistina

trainingcorpus,inourcasetheEuropeanparlia-

mentproceedingsconsistingof20millionwords

ofGerman[Koehn,2002].

Whenjoiningwords,fillerlettersmaybein-

sertedatthejoint.ThesearecalledFugenelemente

inGerman.RecalltheexampleofAktionsplan,

wheretheletterswasinsertedbetweenAktionand

Plan.Sincetherearenosimplerulesforwhen

suchlettersmaybeinsertedweallowthembe-

tweenanytwowords.Asfillersweallowsand

eswhensplittingGermanwords,whichcoversal-

mostallcases.Othertransformationsatjointsin-

cludedroppingofletters,suchaswhenSchweigen

andMinutearejoinedintoSchweigeminute,drop-

pingann.Aextensivestudyofsuchtransforma-