quals writeup: Tree Transducers, Machine Translation, and Cross-Language Divergences

I hope it's not too pretentious to put things I'm writing for my phd qualifiers on arXiv. I think arXiv is really exciting, by the way. Leak your preprints there! Also pretty exciting: tree transducers for machine translation.

Abstract:

Tree transducers are formal automata that transform trees into other trees. Many varieties of tree transducers have been explored in the automata theory literature, and more recently, in the machine translation literature. In this paper I review T and xT transducers, situate them among related formalisms, and show how they can be used to implement rules for machine translation systems that cover all of the cross-language structural divergences described in Bonnie Dorr's influential article on the topic. I also present an implementation of xT transduction, suitable and convenient for experimenting with translation rules.

Paper! http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.6136

Software! http://github.com/alexrudnick/kurt