cca-mt is a package for phrase disambiguation in machine translation (MT).

• NumPy (at least v1.6, preferably v1.9) and SciPy (at least v0.13, preferably v0.15)
• MATLAB for fast SVD/CCA computation
• cdec, for MT tuning and decoding

Inputs:

1. Parallel sentence corpus (tokenized and pre-processed) and word alignments. The parallel corpus should have sentence pairs separated by |||
2. Output of Zhang-Gildea-Chiang Minimal Grammar Extractor (available here)

Steps:

1. Extract minimal phrase pairs from grammar extractor output:

   python utils/extract_rules.py parallel_corpus alignments phrase_pair_dir phrase_pair_counts < extractor_output
   

   The script writes out the phrase pairs on a per-sentence basis, each sentence in a separate .gz file in the phrase_pair_dir location.

   The phrase pair counts are also written, for downstream processing (when featurizing the grammars).

   Options:

   • -l: lexical model; outputs translations from word alignments. STDIN is ignored if enabled.
   • -m X: maximum length of phrase pair. Default is 5.

2. Train the model:

   python train.py phrase_pair_dir parameters < parallel_corpus
   

   The script writes out the parameters in the location specified by the parameters arguments.

   Options:

   • -a X,Y: language model scores, provided in two separate files; the first X contains the phrases in context, and the second Y contains the LM scores; see notes below on how to generate these files.
   • -A X: train multi-layer perceptron (MLP) with one hidden layer containing X hidden units on top of the context and phrase pair representations. Note that if this flag is on and LM information (through the -a flag) has been provided, then the LM score will be added as a feature in the MLP. This is called a matching model.
   • -b: include relative frequency estimates when training the MLP.
   • -c: concatenative model (representations for individual context words are contenated). Default is additive model.
   • -C X: context parameters location; if the file does not exist it will write out the context parameters to the location, otherwise it will read them in from this location.
   • -d: compute MRR for source-channel model. We do not write out parameters in this setting.
   • -D: Use language model scores as a filter. The -a flag must be defined. In this case, when writing out the training data for the MLP, we only write out examples where the correct answer was not ranked 1 by the LM.
   • -f X: restrict context features (words) to provided list. For example, the list could contain the N most frequent words in the language and we only estimate context representations for these words (other words get mapped to <OTHER>).
   • -g X,Y: regularizer strengths. There are two regularizers generally: one for the CCA between left and right contexts, and one for the model. For some setups (e.g., if whitening is set to identity) there is only one regularizer. If only one regularizer is specified, then both regularizers will have this value. Default is 1e-5.
   • -h X: held-out percentage for mean reciprocal rank (MRR) computation.
   • -H: train a direct, high-dimensional model where the context features are the words themselves (and not their representations as computed from a left-right context CCA).
   • -l X: context length (on one side). Default is 2.
   • -L: label-dependent features (not fully working; used for training a direct MLP instead of a matching model).
   • -m X: model after context CCA is computed. Can be one of cca, glm, or mlp. Default is cca.
   • -M: mean-center left and right context matrices. If this is enabled and -m cca as above, then the second CCA step will involve mean-centering.
   • -o X: count of context types to consider for OOV. Context words that occur less than or X times are not included in the list of features and instead their occurrences are used to estimate OOV feature representations. Default is 1.
   • -p: enable position-dependent features for context. Default is bag-of-words.
   • -P: enable singleton pruning for phrase pairs.
   • -s X: filter stop words from context, where the stop word list is provided in X.
   • -S X: for James-Stein shrinkage estimation. Only valid if -m glm is enabled, and one cannot have both -h X and -S X enabled. In this setting, we refine the initial parameters estimated using the normal equations using the shrinkage technique described in R. Shah et al., EMNLP 2010, and X defines the size of the set (as a fraction) to use for this shrinkage.
   • -t X: write out the sparse tokens and context matrices to the provided location. Particularly helpful for large datasets.
   • -u: use uniform cost when training direct MLP (not really supported/working currently)
   • -r X,Y: ranks. If only one rank is provided, then both ranks will have this value. Some models (cca, mlp) require two ranks, one for the context and one for the model itself. Defaults are 100 and 50.
   • -v X: use dense word vectors for features instead of sparse, one-hot feature representations. The word vectors must be estimated elsewhere e.g., using the word2vec software.
   • -V X,Y: read in context word (X) and phrase pair (Y) vectors that have been trained in a skip-gram fashion using pp2vec (modified version of word2vec).
   • -w X: Rescaling of cross-covariance matrix. can be one of identity, diag, ppmi, or full. Default is full.

3. Use the learned parameters to score the relevant phrase pairs for given development/test sets:

   bash pipelines/decode_pipeline.sh scripts_loc cdec_loc working_dir parameters parallel_dev parallel_test phrase_pair_counts baseline_lex_model num_processes
   

   The script evaluates and scores parallel_dev and parallel_test. In order to utilize the various decoder options, you need to edit the top of the script (lines 14-18), change the corresponding .sgm filenames, per-sentence grammar locations, and add the options to the commadn variable.

   Options:

   • -b: output indicator feature for best (highest-scoring) translation option for a given source phrase and position.
   • -c: do not output cca_on/off feature.
   • -C: write out second-order covariance (outer product of context and phrase pair) representations; need -r flag to be on.
   • -d: discretize the continuous context and phrase paire representations; need -r flag to be on.
   • -l: put CCA scores in log space.
   • -L: write out logistic function score on top of regular score.
   • -n X: normalize the scores according to either exp (soft-max) or range (based on minimum and maximum values).
   • -o: convert the scores to be only positive; the scores are dot-product based, so we just convert the cosine similarity scores (angles) to be between 0 and 1.
   • -p: write out the rules as plain i.e., no mark-up or decoration indicating the rule span.
   • -r: write out context and phrase pair representations.
   • -R: write out mean reciprocal rank of phrase pair in lieu of CCA score.

4. Evaluate the resulting .sgm files (and per-sentence grammars with corresponding scores) any way you please (MIRA, MERT, PRO).