Seminar "Selected Topics in Human Language Technology and Pattern Recognition"

Registration for the seminar

Prerequisites for participation in the seminar

• Bachelor students: Einführung in das wissenschaftliche Arbeiten (Proseminar)
• Master students: Bachelor degree
• Diploma students: Vordiplom
• Attendance of at least one of the lectures Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks, Introduction to Statistical Classification, Automatic Speech Recognition, or Statistical Methods in Natural Language Processing, or evidence of equivalent knowledge.
• For successful participants of the above lectures, the possibility of a seminar talk is guaranteed.

Seminar format and important dates

• Proposals: initial proposals (report's content page) have to be submitted by email to your supervisors by Oct. 6, 2014. At this time participants must arrange an appointment with the individual supervisor.
• Article: must be submitted at least 1 month prior to the trial presentation date, but not later than Nov. 17, 2014 to the individual supervisor in electronic form (PDF).
  
• Presentation slides: must be submitted at least 1 week prior to the trial presentation date to the individual supervisor in electronic form (PDF).
• Trial presentations: at least 2 weeks prior to the actual presentation date. Please refer to your individual supervisor to schedule your trial presentation.
• Seminar presentations:will be scheduled after the kick-off meeting, see comments above on seminar mode.
• Final (corrected) articles and presentation slides: must be submitted 2 weeks after the presentation date at the latest to the individual supervisor in electronic form (PDF).
• Compulsory attendance: in order to receive a certificate participants must attend all presentation sessions.
• Ethical Guidelines:The Computer Science Department of RWTH Aachen University has adopted ethical guidelines for the authoring of academic work such as seminar reports. Each student has to comply with these guidelines. In this regard, you, as a seminar attendant, have to sign a declaration of compliance, in which you assert that your work complies with the guidelines, that all references used are properly cited, and that the report was done autonomously by yourself. We ask you do download the guidelines and submit the declaration together with your seminar report and talk to your individual supervisor. You also find a German version of the guidelines and a German version of the declaration you may use as well.

Note: failure to meet deadlines, absence without permission from compulsory sessions (presentations and preliminary meeting as announced by email to each participating student), or dropping out of the seminar after more than 3 weeks after the kick-off meeting (i.e. by Aug. 29, 2014) results in the grade 5.0/not appeared.

Topics, relevant references and participants

List of seminar topics:

1. Machine Translation Evaluation (NN; Supervisor: Markus Freitag)
   References:
   
   • K. Papineni, S. Roukus, T. Ward and W. Zhu: "BLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation," in Proc. ACL, pp. 311-318, Philadelphia, PA, July 2002.
   • M. Snover, B. Dorr, R. Schwartz, L. Micciulla, and J. Makhoul: "A Study of Translation Edit Rate with Targeted Human Annotation," in Proc. AMTA, pp. 223-231. August 2006.
   • A. Lavie, and A. Agarwal: "METEOR: An Automatic Metric for MT Evaluation with High Levels of Correlation with Human Judgments," in Proc. WMT, pp. 228-231, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007.


2. IBM Translation Models (NN; Supervisor: Andy Guta)
   References:
   
   • Chapter 4 of P. Koehn: "Statistical Machine Translation," textbook, Cambridge University Press, January 2010.
   • F. Och, and H. Ney: "Improved statistical alignment models," in Proc. ACL, pp. 440-447, Hong Kong, 2000.


3. Decoding for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (NN; Supervisor: Joern Wübker)
   References:
   
   • Chapter 6 of P. Koehn: "Statistical Machine Translation," textbook, Cambridge University Press, January 2010.
   • P. Koehn: "Pharaoh: a Beam Search Decoder for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation Models," in Proc. AMTA, Washington, DC, September 2004.


4. Hierarchical Phrase-based Machine Translation (Timmermanns; Supervisor: Stephan Peitz)
   References:
   
   • D. Chiang: "Hierarchical Phrase-Based Translation," Computational Linguistics, Vol. 33(2), pp 201-228, June 2007.


5. N-gram-based Machine Translation (NN; Supervisor: Andy Guta)
   References:
   
   • J, Mariño, R. Banchs, J. Crego, A. Gispert, P. Lambert, J. Fonollosa, and M. Costa-jussà: "N-gram-based Machine Translation," in Computational Linguistics, Vol. 32(4), pp. 527-549, December 2006.


6. Lightly-Supervised Training for Statistical Machine Translation (Hamadache; Supervisor: Malte Nuhn)
   References:
   
   • H. Schwenk: "Investigations on Large-Scale Lightly-Supervised Training for Statistical Machine Translation," in Proc. IWSLT, pp. 182-189, Waikiki, Hawaii, USA, October 2008.


7. Large Scale Parallel Document Mining for Machine Translation (Frohn; Supervisor: Malte Nuhn)
   References:
   
   • J. Uszkoreit, J. Ponte, A. Popat, and M. Dubiner: "Large Scale Parallel Document Mining for Machine Translation," in Proc. COLING, pp. 1101-1109, Beijing, China, 2010.
   • J. Smith, H. Saint-Amand, M. Plamada, P. Koehn, C. Callison-Burch, and A. Lopez: "Dirt Cheap Web-Scale Parallel Text from the Common Crawl," in Proc. ACL, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 2013.


8. System Combination for Machine Translation (Wallraff; Supervisor: Markus Freitag)
   References:
   
   • E. Matusov et al.: "System Combination for Machine Translation of Spoken and Written Language," IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Vol. 16(7), pp. 1222-1237, September 2008.
   • A. V. Rosti, N. F. Ayan, B. Xiang, S. Matsoukas, R. Schwartz, and B. Dorr: "Combining Outputs from Multiple Machine Translation Systems," in Proc. NAACL, Rochester, NY, USA, April 2007.


9. Deciphering Foreign Language (Richter; Supervisor: Malte Nuhn)
   References:
   
   • S. Ravi, and K. Knight: "Deciphering Foreign Language", in Proc. ACL, pp. 12-21, Portland, Oregon, USA, 2011.

10. Operation Sequence Model (Graça; Supervisor: Andy Guta)
    References:
    
    • N. Durrani, A. Fraser, H. Schmid, and H. Hoang: "Can Markov Models Over Minimal Translation Units Help Phrase-Based SMT?," in Proc. ACL, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 2013.
    • N. Durrani, A. Fraser, and H. Schmid: "Model With Minimal Translation Units, But Decode With Phrases," in Proc. NAACL, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, June 2013.


11. Discriminative Training for MT (Vaitl; Supervisor: Joern Wübker)
    References:
    
    • S. Green, S. Wang, D. Cer, and C. D. Manning: "Fast and adaptive online training of feature-rich translation models," in Proc. ACL, pp. 311–321, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 2013.
    • H. Yu, L. Huang, H. Mi, and K. Zhao: "Max-violation perceptron and forced decoding for scalable mt training," in Proc. EMNLP, pp. 1112–1123, Seattle, USA, October 2013.


12. Word Alignment with Neural Network (Soliman; Supervisor: Jan-Thorsten Peter)
    References:
    
    • N. Yang, S. Liu, M. Li, M. Zhou, and N. Yu: "Word Alignment Modeling with Context Dependent Deep Neural Network," in Proc. ACL, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 2013.


13. Neural Network in Decoding (Rossenbach; Supervisor: Jan-Thorsten Peter)
    References:
    
    • J. Devlin, R. Zbib, Z. Huang, T. Lamar, R. Schwartz and J. Makhoul: "Fast and Robust Neural Network Joint Models for Statistical Machine Translation," in Proc. ACL, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 2014.
    • A. Vaswani, Y. Zhao, V. Fossum, and D. Chiang: "Decoding with Large-Scale Neural Language Models Improves Translation," in Proc. EMNLP, Seattle, USA, October 2013.


14. Recurrent Neural Networks for Translation Modelling (NN; Supervisor: Joern Wübker)
    References:
    
    • S. Liu, N. Yang, M. Li, and M. Zhou: "A Recursive Recurrent Neural Network for Statistical Machine Translation," in Proc. ACL, pp. 1491-1500, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 2014
    • N. Kalchbrenner, P. Blunsom: "Recurrent Continuous Translation Models," in Proc. EMNLP, pp. 1700-1709, Seattle, WA, Oct. 2013.


15. Syntax-based Machine Translation - String To Tree (Bretschner; Supervisor: Stephan Peitz)
    References:
    
    • P. Williams, and P. Koehn: "GHKM rule extraction and scope-3 parsing in Moses," in Proc. WMT, pp. 388-394, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 2012.
    • M. Galley, M. Hopkins, K. Knight, and D. Marcu: "What's in a translation rule?", in Proc. NAACL, pp. 273-280, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, May 2004.


16. Syntax-based Machine Translation - Tree To String (Schupp; Supervisor: Stephan Peitz)
    References:
    
    • G. Neubig, and K. Duh: "On the Elements of an Accurate Tree-to-String Machine Translation System," in Proc. ACL, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 2014.
    • Y. Liu, Q. Liu, and S. Lin: "Tree-to-string alignment template for statistical machine translation," in Proc. ACL, pp. 609-616, Sydney, Australia, July 2006.

Guidelines for the article and presentation

• Online LaTeX-Documentation:

• LaTeX: "A document preparation system"
• LaTeX help 1.1
• The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX
  
  
• LaTeX 2e for authors

• Document Templates:

• Article Template (164kB),  contains the template and all necessary files in tar format (or here 53kB in zip format).
• Presentation Slide Template (4.9MB), a zip file containing the template and all necessary graphics as well as the institute’s style template.

• Guidelines for articles and presentation slides:

• The aim of the seminar for the participants is to learn the following:
• to tackle a topic and to expand knowledge
• to critically analyze the literature
  
  
• to hold a presentation
  
  
• Take notice of references to other topics in the seminar and discuss topics with one another!
  
  
• Take care to stay within your own topic. To this end participants should be aware of the other topics in the seminar. If applicable, cross-reference other articles and presentations.
  
  

• Important: As part of the introduction, a slide should outline the most important literature used for the presentation. In addition, the presentation should clearly indicate which literature the particular elements of the presentation refer to.
  
  
• Take notice of references to other topics in the seminar and discuss topics with one another!
  
  
• Participants are expected to seek out additional literature on their topic. Assistance with the literature search is available at the faculty’s library. Access to literature is naturally also available at the Lehrstuhl Informatik 6 library.
• Notation/Mathematical Formulas: consistent, correct notation is essential. When necessary, differing notation from various literature sources is to be modified or standardized in order to be clear and consistent. The lectures held by the Lehrstuhl Informatik 6 should provide a guide as to what appropriate notation should look like.
  
  
• Tables must have titles (appearing above the table).
• Figures must have captions (appearing below the figure).
  
  
• In the case that no adequate translation of an English technical term is available, the term should be used unchanged.
• Articles and presentation slides can also be prepared in English.
  
  
• Completeness: acknowledge all literature and sources.
  
  
• Referencing must conform to the standard described in the article template.
• Examples should be used to illustrate points.
• Examples should be as complex as necessary but as simple as possible.
• Slides should be used as presentation aids and not to replace the role of the presenter; specifically, slides should:
• illustrate important points and relationships;
• remind the audience (and the presenter) of important aspects and considerations;
  
  
• give the audience an overview of the presentation.
  
  
• Slides should not contain chunks of text or complicated sentences; rather they should consist of succinct words and terms.
• Use illustrations where appropriate - a picture says a thousand words!
• Abbreviations should be defined at the first usage in the manner demonstrated in the following example: "[...] at the Rheinisch-Westfälischen Technischen Hochschule (RWTH) there are [...]".
  
  
• Take care to stay within your own topic. To this end participants should be aware of the other topics in the seminar. If applicable, cross-reference other articles and presentations.
• Usage of fonts, typefaces and colors in presentation slides must be consistent and appropriate. Such means should serve to clarify points or relationships, not be applied needlessly or at random.
  
  
• Care should be taken when selecting fonts for presentation slides (also within diagrams) to ensure legibility on a projector even for those seated far from the screen.

Contact

Dr. Ralf Schlüter
RWTH Aachen
Lehrstuhl Informatik 6
Ahornstr. 55
52056 Aachen Raum 6125b
Telefon: 0241 / 80-21612
E-Mail: schlueter@cs.rwth-aachen.de

Last modified: 2015-01-20 17:38:34 Disclaimer.