A best-first alignment algorithm for automatic extraction of transfer
mappings from bilingual corpora
Arul Menezes and Stephen D. Richardson
Microsoft Research
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98008, USA
arulm@microsoft.com
steveri@microsoft.com
Abstract
Translation systems that automatically
extract transfer mappings (rules or
examples) from bilingual corpora have
been hampered by the difficulty of
achieving accurate alignment and
acquiring high quality mappings. We
describe an algorithm that uses a best-
first strategy and a small alignment
grammar to significantly improve the
quality of the transfer mappings
extracted. For each mapping,
frequencies are computed and sufficient
context is retained to distinguish
competing mappings during translation.
Variants of the algorithm are run
against a corpus containing 200K
sentence pairs and evaluated based on
the quality of resulting translations.
1 Introduction
A machine translation system requires a
substantial amount of translation knowledge
typically embodied in bilingual dictionaries,
transfer rules, example bases, or a statistical
model. Over the last decade, research has
focused on the automatic acquisition of this
knowledge from bilingual corpora. Statistical
systems build translation models from this data
without linguistic analysis (Brown, 1993).
Another class of systems, including our own,
parses sentences in parallel sentence-aligned
corpora to extract transfer rules or examples
(Kaji, 1992) (Meyers, 2000) (Watanabe, 2000).
These systems typically obtain a predicate-
argument or dependency structure for source
and target sentences, which are then aligned,
and from the resulting alignment, lexical and
structural translation correspondences are
extracted, which are then represented as a set of
rules or an example-base for translation.
However, before this method of knowledge
acquisition can be fully automated, a number of
issues remain to be addressed. The alignment
and transfer-mapping acquisition procedure
must acquire rules with very high precision. It
must be robust against errors introduced by
parsing and sentence-level alignment, errors
intrinsic to the corpus, as well as errors resulting
from the alignment procedure itself. The
procedure must also produce transfer mappings
that provide sufficient context to enable the
translation system utilizing these mappings to
choose the appropriate translation for a given
context.
In this paper, we describe the alignment and
transfer-acquisition algorithm used in our
machine translation system, which attempts to
address the issues raised above. This system
acquires transfer mappings by aligning pairs of
logical form structures (LFs) similar to those
described by Jensen (1993). These LFs are
obtained by parsing sentence pairs from a
sentence-aligned bilingual corpus. (The problem
of aligning parallel corpora at the sentence level
has been addressed by Meyers (1998b) Chen
(1993) and others and is beyond the scope of
this paper).
We show that alignment using a best-first
strategy in conjunction with a small alignment
grammar improves the alignment and the quality
of the acquired transfer mappings.
hacer
usted
información
hipervínculo hipervínculo
clic
dirección
click
Hyperlink_Information
you
address
hyperlink
de de
en en
under
Dsub Dobj
Mod
Dsub
Dobj
Figure 1a: Lexical correspondences Figure 1b: Alignment Mappings
hacer
usted
información
hipervínculo hipervínculo
clic
dirección
click
Hyperlink_Information
you
address
hyperlink
de de
en en
under
Dsub Dobj
Mod
Dsub
Dobj
2 Logical Form
A Logical Form (LF) is an unordered graph
representing the relations among the most
meaningful elements of a sentence. Nodes are
identified by the lemma of a content word and
directed, labeled arcs indicate the underlying
semantic relations. Logical Forms are intended
to be as independent as possible of specific
languages and their grammars. In particular,
Logical Forms from different languages use the
same relation types and provide similar analyses
for similar constructions. The logical form
abstracts away from such language-particular
aspects of a sentence as constituent order,
inflectional morphology, and certain function
words.
Figure 1a illustrates the LFs for the
following Spanish sentence and its
corresponding English translation, which we use
in example below.
En Información del hipervínculo, haga clic en
la dirección del hipervínculo.
Under Hyperlink Information, click the
hyperlink address.
3 Alignment
We consider an alignment of two logical forms
to be a set of mappings, such that each mapping
is between a node or set of nodes (and the
relations between them) in the source LF and a
node or set of nodes (and the relations between
them) in the target LF, where no node
participates in more than one such mapping. In
other words, we allow one-to-one, one-to-many,
many-to-one and many-to-many mappings but
the mappings do not overlap.
Our alignment algorithm proceeds in two
phases. The first phase establishes tentative
lexical correspondences between nodes in the
source and target LFs. The second phase aligns
nodes based on these lexical correspondences as
well as structural considerations. The algorithm
starts from the nodes with the tightest lexical
correspondence (“best-first”) and works outward
from these anchor points.
We first present the algorithm, and then
illustrate how it applies to the sentence-pair in
Figure-1.
3.1 Finding tentative lexical
correspondences
We use a bilingual lexicon that merges data
from several sources (CUP, 1995), (SoftArt,
1995), (Langenscheidt, 1997), and inverts
target-to-source dictionaries to improve
coverage. Our Spanish-English lexicon contains
88,500 translation pairs. We augment this with
19,762 translation correspondences acquired
using statistical techniques described by Moore
(2001).
Like Watanabe (2000) and Meyers (2000),
we use a lexicon to establish initial tentative
word correspondences. However, we have found
that even a relatively large bilingual dictionary
has only moderately good coverage for our
purposes. Hence, we pursue an aggressive
matching strategy for establishing tentative
word correspondences. Using the bilingual
dictionary together with the derivational
morphology component in our system
(Pentheroudakis, 1993), we find direct
translations, translations of morphological bases
and derivations, and base and derived forms of
translations. Fuzzy string matching is also used
to identify possible correspondences. We have
found that aggressive over-generation of
correspondences at this phase is balanced by the
more conservative second phase and results in
improved overall alignment quality.
We also look for matches between
components of multi-word expressions and
individual words. This allows us to align such
expressions that may have been analyzed as a
single lexicalized entity in one language but as
separate words in the other.
3.2 Aligning nodes
Our alignment procedure uses the tentative
lexical correspondences established above, as
well as structural cues, to create affirmative
node alignments. A set of alignment grammar
rules licenses only linguistically meaningful
alignments. The rules are ordered to create the
most unambiguous alignments (“best”) first and
use these to disambiguate subsequent
alignments. The algorithm and the alignment
grammar rules are intended to be applicable
across multiple languages. The rules were
developed while working primarily with a
Spanish-English corpus, but have also been
applied to other language pairs such as French,
German, and Japanese to/from English.
The algorithm is as follows:
1. Initialize the set of unaligned source and
target nodes to the set of all source and
target nodes respectively.
2. Attempt to apply the alignment rules in the
specified order, to each unaligned node or
set of nodes in source and target. If a rule
fails to apply to any unaligned node or set of
nodes, move to the next rule.
3. If all rules fail to apply to all nodes, exit. No
more alignment is possible. (Note: some
nodes may remain unaligned).
4. When a rule applies, mark the nodes or sets
of nodes to which it applied as aligned to
each other and remove them from the lists
of unaligned source and target nodes
respectively. Go to step 2 and apply rules
again, starting from the first rule.
The alignment grammar currently consists
of 18 rules. Below we provide the specification
for some of the most important rules.
1. Bidirectionally unique translation:Asetof
contiguous source nodes S and a set of
contiguous target nodes T such that every
node in S has a lexical correspondence with
every node in T and with no other target
node, and every node in T has a lexical
correspondence with every node in S and
with no other source node. Align S and T to
each other.
2. Translation + Children: A source node S
and a target node T that have a lexical
correspondence, such that each child of S
andTisalreadyalignedtoachildofthe
other. Align S and T to each other.
3. Translation + Parent: A source node S and
a target node T that have a lexical
correspondence, such that a parent P
s
of S
has already been aligned to a parent P
t
of T.
Align S and T to each other.
4. Verb+Object to Verb: AverbV
1
(from
either source or target), that has child O that
is not a verb, but is already aligned to a verb
V
2
, and either V
2
has no unaligned parents,
or V
1
and V
2
have children aligned to each
other. Align V
1
+O to V
2
.
5. Parent + relationship: A source node S and
a target node T, with the same part-of-
speech, and no unaligned siblings, where a
parent P
s
of S is already aligned to a parent
P
t
of T, and the relationship between P
s
and
S is the same as that between P
t
and T.
Align S and T to each other.
6. Child + relationship: Analogous to previous
rule but based on previously aligned
children instead of parents.
Note that rules 4-6 do not exploit lexical
correspondence, relying solely on relationships
between nodes being examined and previously
aligned nodes.
3.3 Alignment Example
In this section, we illustrate the application of
the alignment procedure to the example in
Figure 1. In the first phase, using the bilingual
lexicon, we identify the lexical correspondences
depicted in Figure-1a as dotted lines. Note that
each of the two instances of hipervínculo has
two ambiguous correspondences, and that while
the correspondence from Información to
Hyperlink Information is unique, the reverse is
not. Note also that neither the monolingual nor
bilingual lexicons have been customized for this
domain. For example, there is no entry in either
lexicon for Hyperlink_Information.Thisunithas
been assembled by general-purpose "Captoid"
grammar rules. Similarly, lexical
correspondences established for this unit are
based on translations found for its individual
components, there being no lexicon entry for the
captoid as a whole.
In the next phase, the alignment rules apply
to create alignment mappings depicted in
Figure-1b as dotted lines.
Rule-1: Bidirectionally unique translation,
applies in three places, creating alignment
mappings between dirección and address,
usted and you, and clic and click. These are
the initial “best” alignments that provide the
anchors from which we will work outwards to
align the rest of the structure.
Rule-3: Translation + Parent, applies next to
align the instance of hipervínculo that is the
child of dirección to hyperlink, which is the
child of address. We leverage a previously
created alignment (dirección to address)and
the structure of the logical form to resolve the
ambiguity present at the lexical level.
Rule-1 now applies (where previously it did not)
to create a many-to-one mapping between
información and hipervínculo to
Hyperlink_Information. The uniqueness
condition in this rule is now met because the
ambiguous alternative was cleared away by
the prior application of Rule-3.
Rule-4: Verb+Object to Verb applies to rollup
hacer with its object clic, since the latter is
already aligned to a verb. This produces the
many-to-one alignment of hacer and clic to
click
4 Acquiring Transfer Mappings
Figure-2 shows the transfer mappings derived
from the alignment example in Figure-1.
información
hipervínculo
de
Hyperlink_Inform ation
dirección
hipervínculo
de
address
hyperlink
Mod
hacer
Pron)
clic
enDsub
Dobj
(Noun)
hacer
Pron)
clic
enDsub
Dobj
DobjDsub
click
dirección address(Pron)
información
hipervínculo
de
Hyperlink_Inform ation
under
(Verb)
en
(Verb)
dirección address
hipervínculo hyperlink
DobjDsub
click
(Noun)(Pron)
Figure-2 : Transfer mappings acquired
4.1 Transfer mappings with context
Each mapping created during alignment forms
the core of a family of mappings emitted by the
transfer mapping acquisition procedure. The
alignment mapping by itself represents a
minimal transfer mapping with no context. In
addition, we emit multiple variants, each one
expanding the core mapping with varying types
and amounts of local context.
We use linguistic constructs such as noun
and verb phrases to provide the boundaries for
the context we include. For example, the
transfer mapping for an adjective is expanded to
include the noun it modifies; the mapping for a
modal verb is expanded to include the main
verb; the mapping for a main verb is expanded
to include its object; mappings for collocations
of nouns are emitted individually and as a
whole. Mappings may include “wild card” or
under-specified nodes, with a part of speech, but
no lemma, as shown in Figure 2.
4.2 Alignment Post-processing
After we have acquired transfer mappings from
our entire training corpus, we compute
frequencies for all mappings. We use these to
resolve conflicting mappings, i.e. mappings
where the source sides of the mapping are
identical, but the target sides differ. Currently
we resolve the conflict by simply picking the
most frequent mapping. Note that this does not
imply that we are committed to a single
translation for every word across the corpus,
since we emitted each mapping with different
types and amounts of context (see section 4.1).
Ideally at least one of these contexts serves to
disambiguate the translation. The conflicts being
resolved here are those mappings where the
necessary context is not present.
A drawback of this approach is that we are
relying on a priori linguistic heuristics to ensure
that we have the right context. Our future work
plans to address this by iteratively searching for
the context that serves to optimally
disambiguate (across the entire training corpus)
between conflicting mappings.
4.2.1 Frequency Threshold
During post-processing we also apply a
frequency threshold, keeping only mappings
seen at least N times (where N is currently 2).
This frequency threshold greatly improves the
speed of the runtime system, with negligible
impact on translation quality (see section 5.6).
5 Experiments and Results
5.1 Evaluation methodology
In the evaluation process, we found that various
evaluation metrics of alignment in isolation bore
very little relationship to the quality of the
translations produced by a system that used the
results of such alignment. Since it is the overall
translation quality that we care about, we use the
output quality (as judged by humans) of the MT
system incorporating the transfer mappings
produced by an alignment algorithm (keeping all
other aspects of the system constant) as the
metric for that algorithm.
5.2 Translation system
Our translation system (Richardson, 2001)
begins by parsing an input sentence and
obtaining a logical form. We then search the
transfer mappings acquired during alignment,
for mappings that match portions of the input
LF. We prefer larger (more specific) mappings
to smaller (more general) mappings. Among
mappings of equal size, we prefer higher-
frequency mappings. We allow overlapping
mappings that do not conflict. The lemmas in
any portion of the LF not covered by a transfer
mapping are translated using the same bilingual
dictionary employed during alignment, or by a
handful of hard-coded transfer rules (see Section
5.7 for a discussion of the contribution made by
each of these components). Target LF fragments
from matched transfer mappings and default
dictionary translations are stitched together to
form an output LF. From this, a rule-based
generation component produces an output
sentence.
The system provides output for every input
sentence. Sentences for which spanning parses
are not found are translated anyway, albeit with
lower quality.
5.3 Training corpus
We use a sentence-aligned Spanish-English
training corpus consisting of 208,730 sentence
pairs mostly from technical manuals. The data
was already aligned at the sentence-level since it
was taken from sentence-level translation
memories created by human translators using a
commercial translation-memory product. This
data was parsed and aligned at the sub-sentence
level by our system, using the techniques
described in this paper. Our parser produces a
parseineverycase,butineachlanguage
roughly 15% of the parses produced are “fitted”
or non-spanning. Since we have a relatively
large training corpus, we apply a conservative
heuristic and only use in alignment those
sentence-pairs that produced spanning parses in
both languages. In this corpus 161,606 pairs (or
77.4% of the corpus) were used. This is a
substantially larger training corpus than those
used in previous work on learning transfer
mappings from parsed data. Table-1 presents
some data on the mappings extracted from this
corpus using Best-First.
Total Sentence pairs 208,730
Sentence pairs used 161,606
Number of transfer mappings 1,202,828
Transfer mappings per pair 7.48
Num. unique transfer mappings 437,479
Num. unique after elim. conflicts 369,067
Num. unique with frequency > 1 58,314
Timetakentoalignentirecorpus
(on a 800MHz PC)
74 minutes
Alignment speed 35.6 sent/s
Table-1: Best-first alignment of training corpus
5.4 Experiments
In each experiment we used 5 human evaluators
in a blind evaluation, to compare the translations
produced by the test system with those produced
by a comparison system. Evaluators were
presented, for each sentence, with a reference
human translation and with the two machine
translations in random order, but not the original
source language sentence. They were asked to
pick the better overall translation, taking into
account both content and fluency. They were
allowed to choose “Neither” if they considered
both translations equally good or equally bad.
All the experiments were run with our
Spanish-English system. The test sentences were
randomly chosen from unseen data from the
same domain. Experiment-1 used 200 sentences
and each sentence was evaluated by all raters.
Sentences were rated better for one system or
the other if a majority of the raters agreed.
Experiments 2-4 used 500 sentences each, but
each sentence was rated by a single rater.
In each experiment, the test system was the
system described in section 5.2, loaded with
transfer mappings acquired using the techniques
described in this paper (hereafter “Best-First”).
5.5 Comparison systems
In the first experiment the comparison system is
a highly rated commercial system, Babelfish
(http://world.altavista.com).
Each of the next three experiments varies
some key aspect of Best-First in order to explore
the properties of the algorithm.
5.5.1 Bottom Up
Experiment-2 compares Best-First to the
previous algorithm we employed, which used a
bottom-up approach, similar in spirit to that used
by Meyers (1998a).
This algorithm follows the procedure
described in section 3.1 to establish tentative
lexical correspondences. However, it does not
use an alignment grammar, and relies on a
bottom-up rather than a best-first strategy. It
starts by aligning the leaf nodes and proceeds
upwards, aligning nodes whose child nodes have
already aligned. Nodes that do not align are
skipped over, and later rolled-up with ancestor
nodes that have successfully aligned.
5.5.2 No Context
Experiment-3 uses a comparison algorithm that
differs from Best First in that it retains no
context (see section 4.1) when emitting transfer
mappings.
5.5.3 No Threshold
The comparison algorithm used in Experiment-4
differs from Best First in that the frequency
threshold (see section 4.2.1) is not applied, i.e.
all transfer mappings are retained.
Comparison
System
Num. sentences
Best-First rated
better
Num. sentences
comparison
system rated better
Num. sentences
neither rated better
Net percentage
improvement
Babelfish 93 (46.5%) 73 (36.5%) 34 (17%) 10.0%
Bottom-Up 224 (44.8%) 111 (22.2%) 165 (33%) 22.6%
No-Context 187 (37.4%) 69 (13.8%) 244 (48.8%) 23.6%
No-Threshold 112 (22.4%) 122 (24.4%) 266 (53.2%) -2.0%
Table-2: Translation Quality
5.6 Discussion
The results of the four experiments are
presented in Table-2.
Experiment-1 establishes that the algorithm
presented in this paper automatically acquires
translation knowledge of sufficient quantity and
quality as to enable translations that exceed the
quality of a highly rated traditional MT system.
Note however that Babelfish/Systran was not
customized to this domain.
Experiment-2 shows that Best-First
produces transfer mappings resulting in
significantly better translations than Bottom-Up.
Using Best-First produced better translations for
a net of 22.6% of the sentences.
Experiment-3 shows that retaining sufficient
context in transfer mappings is crucial to
translation quality, producing better translations
for a net of 23.6% of the sentences.
Experiment-4 shows that the frequency
threshold hurts translation quality slightly (a net
loss of 2%), but as Table-3 shows it results in a
much smaller (approx. 6 times) and faster
(approx 45 times) runtime system.
Num
mappings
Translation speed
(500 sentences)
Best-First 58,314 173s (0.34s/sent)
No-Threshold 359,528 8059s (17s/sent)
Table-3: Translation Speed (500 sentences)
5.7 Transfer mapping coverage
Using end-to-end translation quality as a metric
for alignment leaves open the question of how
much of the translation quality derives from
alignment versus other sources of translation
knowledge in our system, such as the bilingual
dictionary, or the 2 hand-coded transfer rules in
our system. To address this issue we measured
the contribution of each using a 3264-sentence
test set. Table-4 presents the results. The first
column indicates the total number of words in
each category. The next four columns indicate
the percentage translated using each knowledge
source, and the percentage not translated
respectively.
As the table shows, the vast majority of
content words get translated using transfer-
mappings obtained via alignment.
Our alignment algorithm does not explicitly
attempt to learn transfer mappings for pronouns,
but pronouns are sometimes included in transfer
mappings when they form part of the context
that is included with each mapping (see section
4.1). The 31.89% of pronoun translations that
the table indicates as coming from alignment
fall into this category.
Our algorithm does try to learn transfer
mappings for prepositions and conjunctions,
which are represented in the Logical Form as
labels on arcs (see Figure-1). Mappings for
prepositions and conjunctions always include
the nodes on both ends of this arc. These
mappings may translate a preposition in the
source language to a preposition in the target
language, or to an entirely different relationship,
such as direct object, indirect object, modifier
etc.
As the table shows, the system is currently
less successful at learning transfer mappings for
prepositions and conjunctions than it is for
content words.
As a temporary measure we have 2 hand-
coded transfer rules that apply to prepositions,
which account for 8.4% of such transfers. We
intend for these to eventually be replaced by
mappings learned from the data.
Number of
instances
Alignment Dictionary Rules Not
translated
Content words 21,245 93.50% 4.10% 0% 2.4%
Pronouns 2,158 31.89% 68.20% 0% 0%
Prepositions/Conjunctions 6,640 32.00% 59.70% 8.4% 0%
Table-4: Coverage of transfer mappings, dictionary & rules
6 Conclusions and Future Work
We proposed an algorithm for automatically
acquiring high-quality transfer mappings from
sentence-aligned bilingual corpora using an
alignment grammar and a best-first strategy.
We reported the results of applying the
algorithm to a substantially larger training
corpus than that used in previously reported
work on learning transfer mappings from parsed
data.
We showed that this approach produces
transfer mappings that result in translation
quality comparable to a commercial MT system
for this domain.
We also showed that a best-first, alignment-
grammar based approach produced better results
than a bottom-up approach, and that retaining
context in the acquired transfer mappings is
essential to translation quality.
We currently rely on a priori linguistic
heuristics to try to provide the right context for
each transfer mapping. In future work, we plan
to use machine-learning techniques to determine
the extent of the context that optimally
disambiguates between conflicting mappings.

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