Presented at Baltic HLT 2018 https://www.hlt2018.ut.ee/

1. Advancing Estonian Machine Translation
Matīss Rikters, Mārcis Pinnis, Roberts Rozis
Tilde
{firstname.lastname}@tilde.lv
September 28, 2018

2. Problems
• Insufficient amount of high-quality data
• Weak baseline systems
• Poor performance when translating between
Estonian and a non-English language
• The very best MT systems are usually found in experimental
environments and are inaccessible to the general public

3. Solutions
• Collection of Data
• Improvements for Neural Machine Translation Systems
• Translation Application for Mobile Devices

4. Collection of Data
• Publicly available parallel corpora resources
DGT-TM, DCEP, Europarl, Opus, and others
• Estonian national sources
content collected from public sector of Estonian institutions and their websites
• Corpora built from sources identified outside of Europe
Quite often – content in public, multilingual European web sites. We identify, collect,
process and publish such content in open data portals. E.g., results of Estonian Open
Parallel Corpus (EOPC) project published in the META-SHARE repository; results of
ODINE project published in TILDE MODEL site

5. Data

6. Multilingual NMT
Johnson et al. 2016
<2et> uncle Dick died when I was fifteen .
<2et> the girl stopped , and looked him in the eyes .
<2et> she had taken off her bonnet and held it in her hand .
<2et> Charles rose and looked out of the window .
<2et> he wished he could draw .
<2et> he began to cover the ambiguous face in lather .
<2et> и все таки она очень хотела ей помочь .
<2et> Преследуемая женщина прыгнула со скалы .
<2et> ей не удавалось найти общий язык с другими детьми .
<2ru> hoidke käed alati sõidu ajal sõiduki juhtimiseks vabad .
<2ru> selle rakenduse kasutamiseks peab teie veebilehitseja toetama Javascripti .
<2ru> juhtmeta seadmed võivad häirida lennuki toimimist .
<2ru> Ärge kasutage seadet tanklas , kütuse ega kemikaalide lähedal .
<2ru> Ärge unustage teha kogu olulisest infost varu - või kirjalikke koopiaid .
onu Dick suri , kui olin viisteist .
tüdruk peatus ja vaatas talle silma .
ta oli kübara peast võtnud ning hoidis seda käes .
Charles tõusis ja vaatas aknast välja .
ta tahtnuks osata joonistada .
ta asus oma kahemõttelist ilmet seebivahuga katma .
ja siiski tahtnuks ta väga teda aidata .
tagaaetav naine hüppas kaljult alla .
ta ei saanud teiste õpilastega hästi läbi
Пусть во время вождения ваши руки всегда будут свободны для управления транспортным средством .
если вы хотите использовать эту прикладную программу , ваш браузер должен поддерживать “ Javascript ” .
радиотехнические устройства могут мешать функционированию самолета .
не используйте устройство на заправочных станциях или рядом с топливом или химическими веществами .
те забудьте создать резервные копии всей важной информации или запишите эту информацию .

7. Multilingual NMT
Rikters et al. 2018
Multilingual NMT support in Nematus
• Specify all training languages and the respective files in the configuration
• Automatically add target language tags to source sentences
• Shuffle an equal portion of each language in each batch
Scripts for easy multilingual NMT training with other frameworks
• Upscale data from all languages to the amount of the largest corpus
• Add target language tags to all source sentences
https://github.com/tilde-nlp/multilingual-nmt-data-prep

8. Experiments

9. Experiments

10. Results

11. Android App

12. Conclusions
• New state-of-the-art MT systems for
• Estonian ↔ Russian
• Estonian ↔ English
• Available online
• masintolge.ee
• github.com/tilde-nlp/et-mt-tools

13. ”Neural Network Modelling for Inflected Natural Languages”
No. 1.1.1.1/16/A/215.