U.S.-Germany Dissertation Enhancement: Predicting Hidden Structure and Punctuation in Speech for Machine Translation

该项目将把华盛顿大学的研究生达斯汀·希拉德送到RWTH亚琛大学，为期三个月，为他在机器翻译领域的博士论文进行研究。希拉德先生将在亚琛与赫尔曼·奈教授合作，他还将与卡尔斯鲁厄大学的亚历克斯·怀贝尔教授合作。该奖项的评委玛丽·奥斯滕多夫教授是希拉德先生在华盛顿大学的论文导师。这项研究解决了机器翻译中关于标点符号的两个主要问题：从对翻译单词的评估来看，除了单词之外，还有什么信息可以提供给语音翻译系统，以提高翻译质量？如何最好地预测目标语言输出的标点符号？实验结果将提供标点符号和隐藏韵律结构如何与机器翻译相互作用的全面比较。此外，还将研究无监督学习算法，以便利用句法辅助信息发现源语言中隐藏的韵律结构，并将该结构传递给翻译和目标语言输出。智力价值该奖项支持的研究具有挑战性，可能会促进机器翻译的基础知识。它代表了美国研究人员和德国研究人员之间基于智力的合作伙伴关系。Broader ImpactsSupport为一名研究生在德国进行研究提供支持，从而为美国学生提供国际研究体验。此外，机器翻译的进步将有助于在多语言世界中进行交流，并可能应用于商业和国家安全部门。

This project will send Dustin Hillard, a graduate student at the University of Washington, to RWTH Aachen University for three months to conduct research for his doctoral dissertation in the field of machine translation. Mr. Hillard will collaborate with Professor Hermann Ney in Aachen and he will also collaborate with Professor Alex Waibel at the University of Karlsruhe. Professor Mari Ostendorf, the PI on this award, is Mr. Hillard's thesis advisor at the University of Washington.This research addresses two primary questions dealing with punctuation in machine translation: What information beyond the words can be given to a speech translation system to improve the translation quality in terms of evaluation of the translated words? How is the punctuation for the target language output best predicted? The experimental results will provide comprehensive comparisons of how punctuation and hidden prosodic structure interact with machine translation. In addition, unsupervised learning algorithms will be investigated for detecting hidden prosodic structure in the source language using syntactic side information and for communicating that structure to translation and target language output. Intellectual MeritThe research supported by this award is challenging and could potentially advance fundamental knowledge in machine translation. It represents an intellectually well-founded partnership between researchers in the U.S and researchers in Germany.Broader ImpactsSupport is provided for one graduate student to conduct research in Germany, thus providing a U.S. student with an international research experience. In addition, advances in machine translation will help communication in a multi-lingual world and could have applications to the commercial and national security sectors.