<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="static/style.xsl"?><OAI-PMH xmlns="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/ http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/OAI-PMH.xsd"><responseDate>2026-09-22T16:55:34Z</responseDate><request verb="GetRecord" identifier="oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/247502" metadataPrefix="uketd_dc">https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/oai/request</request><GetRecord><record><header><identifier>oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/247502</identifier><datestamp>2024-06-27T10:47:39Z</datestamp><setSpec>com_1810_213729</setSpec><setSpec>com_1810_256065</setSpec><setSpec>col_1810_219485</setSpec></header><metadata><uketd_dc:uketddc xmlns:uketd_dc="http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/ethos-oai/2.0/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:uketdterms="http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/ethos-oai/terms/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:doc="http://www.lyncode.com/xoai" xsi:schemaLocation="http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/ethos-oai/2.0/ http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/ethos-oai/2.0/uketd_dc.xsd">
   <dc:title>Refinements in hierarchical phrase-based translation systems</dc:title>
   <dc:identifier xsi:type="dcterms:DOI">10.17863/CAM.14090</dc:identifier>
   <dc:creator>Pino, Juan Miguel</dc:creator>
   <dcterms:abstract>The relatively recently proposed hierarchical phrase-based translation model&#xd;
for statistical machine translation (SMT) has achieved state-of-the-art performance&#xd;
in numerous recent translation evaluations. Hierarchical phrase-based&#xd;
systems comprise a pipeline of modules with complex interactions. In&#xd;
this thesis, we propose refinements to the hierarchical phrase-based model&#xd;
as well as improvements and analyses in various modules for hierarchical&#xd;
phrase-based systems.&#xd;
We took the opportunity of increasing amounts of available training data&#xd;
for machine translation as well as existing frameworks for distributed computing&#xd;
in order to build better infrastructure for extraction, estimation and&#xd;
retrieval of hierarchical phrase-based grammars. We design and implement&#xd;
grammar extraction as a series of Hadoop MapReduce jobs. We store the resulting&#xd;
grammar using the HFile format, which offers competitive trade-offs&#xd;
in terms of efficiency and simplicity. We demonstrate improvements over two&#xd;
alternative solutions used in machine translation.&#xd;
The modular nature of the SMT pipeline, while allowing individual improvements,&#xd;
has the disadvantage that errors committed by one module are&#xd;
propagated to the next. This thesis alleviates this issue between the word&#xd;
alignment module and the grammar extraction and estimation module by&#xd;
considering richer statistics from word alignment models in extraction. We&#xd;
use alignment link and alignment phrase pair posterior probabilities for grammar&#xd;
extraction and estimation and demonstrate translation improvements in&#xd;
Chinese to English translation.&#xd;
This thesis also proposes refinements in grammar and language modelling&#xd;
both in the context of domain adaptation and in the context of the interaction&#xd;
between first-pass decoding and lattice rescoring. We analyse alternative&#xd;
strategies for grammar and language model cross-domain adaptation. We&#xd;
also study interactions between first-pass and second-pass language model in terms of size and n-gram order. Finally, we analyse two smoothing methods&#xd;
for large 5-gram language model rescoring.&#xd;
The last two chapters are devoted to the application of phrase-based&#xd;
grammars to the string regeneration task, which we consider as a means to&#xd;
study the fluency of machine translation output. We design and implement a&#xd;
monolingual phrase-based decoder for string regeneration and achieve state-of-the-art&#xd;
performance on this task. By applying our decoder to the output&#xd;
of a hierarchical phrase-based translation system, we are able to recover the&#xd;
same level of translation quality as the translation system.</dcterms:abstract>
   <uketdterms:institution>University of Cambridge</uketdterms:institution>
   <dcterms:issued>2015-04-07</dcterms:issued>
   <dc:type>Thesis</dc:type>
   <uketdterms:qualificationlevel>Doctoral</uketdterms:qualificationlevel>
   <uketdterms:qualificationname>Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)</uketdterms:qualificationname>
   <dc:language>en</dc:language>
   <dcterms:isReferencedBy xsi:type="dcterms:URI">https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/247502</dcterms:isReferencedBy>
   <dc:identifier xsi:type="dcterms:URI">https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/615317ea-f755-425e-9888-756948afd7a4/download</dc:identifier>
   <uketdterms:checksum xsi:type="uketdterms:MD5">823f1dd9737d68bb08bbef7b7f1de46b</uketdterms:checksum>
   <dcterms:license>https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/3ac74658-712a-4944-ba2f-fe6ecf4a66a4/download</dcterms:license>
   <uketdterms:checksum xsi:type="uketdterms:MD5">835269bda140c10400fe0606a14c3d21</uketdterms:checksum>
   <dc:subject>statistical machine translation</dc:subject>
   <dc:subject>hierarchical phrase-based translation</dc:subject>
   <dc:subject>natural language processing</dc:subject>
   <dc:subject>language modeling</dc:subject>
   <dc:subject>natural language generation</dc:subject>
</uketd_dc:uketddc>
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