We argue that learning word alignments through a compositionally-structured, joint process yields higher phrase-based translation accuracy than the conventional heuristic of intersecting conditional models. Flawed word alignments can lead to flawed phrase translations that damage translation accuracy. Yet the IBM word alignments usually used today are known to be flawed, in large part because I...

This paper describes our methodologies for NTCIR-7 Patent Translation Task, and reports the official results based on English and Japanese corpus. Our system was a novel combination pattern of machine translation algorithms including classical statistical method -IBM model and highly efficient decoding algorithm. The result of this new method is relatively decent, and its speed is also fast. It...

Amidst the recent crazes for emerging technologies like speech recognition and biometrics, speaker recognition is slowly reaching the maturity to be deemed practical in many diierent applications. This paper presents new approaches for text-independent speaker recognition. The performances of the model-based algorithm presented concurrently at the ICASSP'98 conference and the frame-based algori...

background: the fertility experience in iran suggests that the family planning programs had an effective role in the fertility reduction. this study aimed to specify patterns of marriage in iran and especially in a northern city of iran and to investigate the association between patterns of marriage and contraceptive use before first pregnancy and current contraceptive use. methods: in this cro...

Developing population dynamics models for zebrafish is crucial in order to extrapolate from toxicity data measured at the organism level to biological levels relevant to support and enhance ecological risk assessment. To achieve this, a dynamic energy budget for individual zebrafish (DEB model) was coupled to an individual based model of zebrafish population dynamics (IBM model). Next, we fitte...

Using a recent convex formulation of IBM Model 2, we propose a new initialization scheme which has some favorable comparisons to the standard method of initializing IBM Model 2 with IBM Model 1. Additionally, we derive the Viterbi alignment for the convex relaxation of IBM Model 2 and show that it leads to better F-Measure scores than those of IBM Model 2.

Several recent efforts in statistical natural language understanding (NLU) have focused on generating clumps of English words from semantic meaning concepts (Miller et al., 1995; Levin and Pieraccini, 1995; Epstein et al., 1996; Epstein, 1996). This paper extends the IBM Machine Translation Group's concept of fertility (Brown et al., 1993) to the generation of clumps for natural language unders...

Mixture modelling is a standard pattern classification technique. However, in statistical machine translation, the use of mixture modelling is still unexplored. Two main advantages of the mixture approach are first, its flexibility to find an appropriate tradeoff between model complexity and the amount of training data available and second, its capability to learn specific probability distribut...

RuleBase is a symbolic model checking tool, developed by the IBM Haifa Research Laboratory. It is the result of four years of experience in practical formal verification of hardware which, we believe, has been a key factor in bringing the tool to its current level of maturity. Our experience shows that after a short training period, designers can operate the tool independently and achieve impre...