Stephen D. Richardson


2024

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The Effects of Pretraining in Video-Guided Machine Translation
Ammon Shurtz | Lawry Sorenson | Stephen D. Richardson
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

We propose an approach that improves the performance of VMT (Video-guided Machine Translation) models, which integrate text and video modalities. We experiment with the MAD (Movie Audio Descriptions) dataset, a new dataset which contains transcribed audio descriptions of movies. We find that the MAD dataset is more lexically rich than the VATEX dataset (the current VMT baseline), and we experiment with MAD pretraining to improve performance on the VATEX dataset. We experiment with two different video encoder architectures: a Conformer (Convolution-augmented Transformer) and a Transformer. Additionally, we conduct experiments by masking the source sentences to assess the degree to which the performance of both architectures improves due to pretraining on additional video data. Finally, we conduct an analysis of the transfer learning potential of a video dataset and compare it to pretraining on a text-only dataset. Our findings demonstrate that pretraining with a lexically rich dataset leads to significant improvements in model performance when models use both text and video modalities.

2022

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Lingua: Addressing Scenarios for Live Interpretation and Automatic Dubbing
Nathan Anderson | Caleb Wilson | Stephen D. Richardson
Proceedings of the 15th Biennial Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 2: Users and Providers Track and Government Track)

Lingua is an application developed for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that performs both real-time interpretation of live speeches and automatic video dubbing (AVD). Like other AVD systems, it can perform synchronized automatic dubbing, given video files and optionally, corresponding text files using a traditional ASR–MT–TTS pipeline. Lingua’s unique contribution is that it can also operate in real-time with a slight delay of a few seconds to interpret live speeches. If no source-language script is provided, the translations are exactly as recognized by ASR and translated by MT. If a script is provided, Lingua matches the recognized ASR segments with script segments and passes the latter to MT for translation and subsequent TTS. If a human translation is also provided, it is passed directly to TTS. Lingua switches between these modes dynamically, enabling translation of off-script comments and different levels of quality for multiple languages. (see extended abstract)

2012

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Using the Microsoft Translator Hub at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Stephen D. Richardson
Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Commercial MT User Program

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints undertook an extensive effort at the beginning of this year to deploy machine translation (MT) in the translation workflow for the content on its principal website, www.lds.org. The objective of this effort is to reduce by at least 50% the time required by human translators to translate English content into nine other languages and publish it on this site. This paper documents the experience to date, including selection of the MT system, preparation and use of data to customize the system, initial deployment of the system in the Church’s translation workflow, post-editing training for translators, the resulting productivity improvements, and plans for future deployments.

2004

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Machine translation of online product support articles using data-driven MT system
Stephen D. Richardson
Proceedings of the 6th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers

At AMTA 2002, we reported on a pilot project to machine translate Microsoft’s Product Support Knowledge Base into Spanish. The successful pilot has since resulted in the permanent deployment of both Spanish and Japanese versions of the knowledge base, as well as ongoing pilot projects for French and German. The translated articles in each case have been produced by MSR-MT, Microsoft Research’s data-driven MT system, which has been trained on well over a million bilingual sentence pairs for each target language from previously translated materials contained in translation memories and glossaries. This paper describes our experience in deploying this system and the (positive) customer response to the availability of machine translated articles, as well as other uses of MSR-MT either planned or underway at Microsoft.

2002

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MSR-MT: the Microsoft research machine translation system
Willaim B. Dolan | Jessie Pinkham | Stephen D. Richardson
Proceedings of the 5th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: System Descriptions

MSR-MT is an advanced research MT prototype that combines rule-based and statistical techniques with example-based transfer. This hybrid, large-scale system is capable of learning all its knowledge of lexical and phrasal translations directly from data. MSR-MT has undergone rigorous evaluation showing that, trained on a corpus of technical data similar to the test corpus, its output surpasses the quality of best-of-breed commercial MT systems.

2001

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Overcoming the customization bottleneck using example-based MT
Stephen D. Richardson | William B. Dolan | Arul Menezes | Monica Corston-Oliver
Proceedings of the ACL 2001 Workshop on Data-Driven Methods in Machine Translation

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A best-first alignment algorithm for automatic extraction of transfer mappings from bilingual corpora
Arul Menezes | Stephen D. Richardson
Proceedings of the ACL 2001 Workshop on Data-Driven Methods in Machine Translation

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A best-first alignment algorithm for automatic extraction of transfer mappings from bilingual corpora
Arul Menezes | Stephen D. Richardson
Workshop on Example-Based machine Translation

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 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.

1998

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MindNet: acquiring and structuring semantic information from text
Stephen D. Richardson | William B. Dolan | Lucy Vanderwende
COLING 1998 Volume 2: The 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

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MindNet: Acquiring and Structuring Semantic Information from Text
Stephen D. Richardson | William B. Dolan | Lucy Vanderwende
36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Volume 2

1994

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Bootstrapping Statistical Processing into a Rule-Based Natural Language Parser
Stephen D. Richardson
The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language

1993

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Combining Dictionary-Based and Example-Based Methods for Natural Language Analysis
Stephen D. Richardson | Lucy Vanderwende | William Dolan
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages

1988

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The Experience of Developing a Large-Scale Natural Language Text Processing System: Critique
Stephen D. Richardson | Lisa C. Braden-Harder
Second Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing