Books Blog: books.elliottback.com

The results of the 2005 NIST evaluation are now online:

www.nist.gov

The winner, hands down, appears to be Google who were able to translate two texts in Arabic and Chinese to English with the best precision on the BLEU-4. If you don’t know what the Bleu metric measures, NIST has an explanation:

Machine translation quality was measured automatically using an N-gram co-occurrence statistic metric developed by IBM and referred to as BLEU. BLEU measures translation accuracy according to the N-grams or sequence of N-words that it shares with one or more high quality reference translations. Thus, the more co-occurrences the better the score. BLEU is an accuracy metric, ranging from “0″ to “1″ with “1″ being the best possible score.

You can also read the original paper from IBM research. The google entry used parallel statistical analysis. You can read about their pride and joy on their own blog.

How does a parallel statistical translation model work? You feed a classifying engine two text streams in the languages of choice, and it will associate words and phrases in one language with words and phrases in the next, for example, feeding it:

Me falta el tiempo.

and the english version

I don’t have time!

The engine may associate el tiempo with time more strongly, since it’s seen that before, but create a special rule for the phrase me falta which in this context means I don’t have and not anything deriving regularly from to lack.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 22nd, 2005 at 4:26 pm and is tagged with translation accuracy, translation model, text streams, languages of choice, gram co, metric measures, translation quality, machine translation, google, quality reference, pride and joy, model work, el tiempo, nist, statistical analysis, occurrences, statistic, occurrence, phrases, arabic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

One Response to 'Automated Machine Translation'

1. 
   Idetrorce said:

   on December 15th, 2007 at 7:45 am

   very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
   Idetrorce

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Please take time to enjoy the archives: June 2008 (2) May 2008 (1) April 2008 (1) February 2008 (1) January 2008 (3) October 2007 (2) September 2007 (1) August 2007 (3) July 2007 (4) June 2007 (3) May 2007 (2) April 2007 (5) March 2007 (3) February 2007 (3) January 2007 (1) December 2006 (3) November 2006 (4) October 2006 (1) September 2006 (3) August 2006 (2) February 2006 (3) January 2006 (2) December 2005 (3) November 2005 (2) October 2005 (4) September 2005 (1) August 2005 (5) July 2005 (4) June 2005 (1) May 2005 (3) April 2005 (8) March 2005 (8) February 2005 (8) January 2005 (11) December 2004 (6) November 2004 (6)

Fresh, related resources: