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-