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Disambiguating Temporal-Contrastive Discourse Connectives for Machine Translation

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Machine translation

Machine translation is use of either rule-based or probabilistic (i.e. statistical and, most recently, neural network-based) machine learning approaches to translation of text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages. History of machine translation The origins of machine translation can be traced back to the work of Al-Kindi, a ninth-century Arabic cryptographer who developed techniques for systemic language translation, including cryptanalysis, frequency analysis, and probability and statistics, which are used in modern machine translation.

Statistical machine translation

Statistical machine translation (SMT) was a machine translation approach, that superseded the previous, rule-based approach because it required explicit description of each and every linguistic rule, which was costly, and which often did not generalize to other languages. Since 2003, the statistical approach itself has been gradually superseded by the deep learning-based neural network approach. The first ideas of statistical machine translation were introduced by Warren Weaver in 1949, including the ideas of applying Claude Shannon's information theory.

Translation

Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between translating (a written text) and interpreting (oral or signed communication between users of different languages); under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance of writing within a language community.

Universal quantification

In mathematical logic, a universal quantification is a type of quantifier, a logical constant which is interpreted as "given any", "for all", or "for any". It expresses that a predicate can be satisfied by every member of a domain of discourse. In other words, it is the predication of a property or relation to every member of the domain. It asserts that a predicate within the scope of a universal quantifier is true of every value of a predicate variable.

Propositional variable

In mathematical logic, a propositional variable (also called a sentential variable or sentential letter) is an input variable (that can either be true or false) of a truth function. Propositional variables are the basic building-blocks of propositional formulas, used in propositional logic and higher-order logics. Formulas in logic are typically built up recursively from some propositional variables, some number of logical connectives, and some logical quantifiers.

Neural machine translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) is an approach to machine translation that uses an artificial neural network to predict the likelihood of a sequence of words, typically modeling entire sentences in a single integrated model. They require only a fraction of the memory needed by traditional statistical machine translation (SMT) models. Furthermore, unlike conventional translation systems, all parts of the neural translation model are trained jointly (end-to-end) to maximize the translation performance.

Propositional formula

In propositional logic, a propositional formula is a type of syntactic formula which is well formed and has a truth value. If the values of all variables in a propositional formula are given, it determines a unique truth value. A propositional formula may also be called a propositional expression, a sentence, or a sentential formula. A propositional formula is constructed from simple propositions, such as "five is greater than three" or propositional variables such as p and q, using connectives or logical operators such as NOT, AND, OR, or IMPLIES; for example: (p AND NOT q) IMPLIES (p OR q).

Literal translation

Literal translation, direct translation, or word-for-word translation is a translation of a text done by translating each word separately without looking at how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence. In translation theory, another term for literal translation is metaphrase (as opposed to paraphrase for an analogous translation). It is to be distinguished from an interpretation (done, for example, by an interpreter). Literal translation leads to mistranslation of idioms, which was once a serious problem for machine translation.

Translation memory

A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores "segments", which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list) that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. The translation memory stores the source text and its corresponding translation in language pairs called “translation units”. Individual words are handled by terminology bases and are not within the domain of TM.

Example-based machine translation

Example-based machine translation (EBMT) is a method of machine translation often characterized by its use of a bilingual corpus with parallel texts as its main knowledge base at run-time. It is essentially a translation by analogy and can be viewed as an implementation of a case-based reasoning approach to machine learning. At the foundation of example-based machine translation is the idea of translation by analogy.