Today Pablo Gamallo showed to the CiTIUS community the basis of the “Semantics and Compositional Translation”. A brief summary of the presentation, as the slides used in it, can be found below.
The current strategies in statistical and neural machine translation rely on the use of parallel and aligned corpora, as well as on non-compositional phrase segmentation. However, other strategies are possible, namely the use of non-parallel bilingual corpora and compositional segmentation; a new translation method that requires building the contextual meaning of sentences by making use of distributional models in a compositional way.
In this talk, the key aspects and the main applications of compositional distributional semantics will be explored. For instance: how to build the composite meaning of “red car” from the senses of its constituent words if each word is defined as a vector of linguistic contexts in a distributional model? Special attention will be paid to a new method for machine translation based on distributional models and compositional semantics. From this point of view, translating is the process of paraphrasing in a bilingual space.