content writing optimization with rewriter

CONTENT WRITING OPTIMIZATION WITH

REWRITER

Anabela Barreiro

[email protected]

Translating and the Computer Conference 2010 Anabela Barreiro London, 18-19 November 2010

OUTLINELINGUISTIC QUALITY ASSURANCEHOW TO ACHIEVE WRITING OPTIMIZATIONREWRITERPARAPHRASES COVERED BY REWRITERREWRITER V0.1 AND V0.2 – INTERFACE AND MODUS

OPERANDILINGUISTIC RESOURCES USED BY REWRITEREVALUATION RESULTSTRANSFORMATIONS FOR THE NEAR FUTUREWHO COULD BENEFIT FROM REWRITER?FROM REWRITER TO MACHINE TRANSLATIONIMPROVEMENT OF REWRITER


http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/index.shtml

LINGUISTIC QUALITY ASSURANCE


Reassures that a certain level of linguistic quality is guaranteed in texts

Uses techniques to verify the quality of specialized documentation

Helps individuals/businesses connect with their target audience in a clear and understandable way by achieving:

• strategic, high quality, meaningful content

• relevant content written and optimized specifically for a particular purpose (or for a particular business)

• custom content (relevant keywords and adequate terminologies)

• original texts (creative writing) or domain specific texts (technical writing)

• readable / publishable content


LINGUISTIC QUALITY ASSURANCE


Professional text writing and revision

• Orthographic, grammatical, stylistic and terminological verification of the technical documents

• Use of tools Spell and grammar checkers Writing/authoring aids Style guides Terminologies (technical domains) Controlled language

• Consistent, direct, and simple language• Restricted grammar (avoid certain types of construction)• Avoid complex reasoning, figures of speech, metaphors, etc.• Elimination of wordiness


HOW TO ACHIEVE WRITING OPTIMIZATION


Synonymy

Stylistics

PARAPHRASING

• effective in helping writers with writing difficulties or learners of a non-native language (pedagogical exercise)

• essential component in the translation process and of an extreme value to machine translation pre-editing

• can be employed in linguistic quality assurance for both source and target texts

For the past few years, researchers have been trying to achieve automated paraphrasing to respond to the commercial enterprises’ wish to include paraphrases in their text processing tools, authoring aids, learning tools, etc.


REWRITER – PARAPHRASING TOOLauthoring aid (word processing applications)

Language composition tool

Text production and style editor

Empirical testbed for linguistic quality assurance (source and target texts)

text (pre-)editing (machine translation)

“Revision memory” tool (≈ “translation memory”)

Applicable to general and technical language (e.g. student texts or legal texts)

Portuguese version “ReEscreve” - publicly available service at: http://www.linguateca.pt/ReEscreve/ Soon to be integrated in a cyber school project – “Ciberescola”


http://www.linguateca.pt/ReEscreve/


PARAPHRASES COVERED BY REWRITER

Synonyms in context (ex: phrasal verbs into equivalent expressions)to clear up (weather) = (weather) to become better/brighter

Support verb constructions into single verbsto make a decision = to decide make a presentation of = presentto give support to N(AN) = to support N(AN)to go V-ing = to continue V-ingto get into contact with = to contactto turn on N(light) = to extinguish N(light)to become acid = to acidify

Support verb constructions into their stylistic variants to make an audit = to perform an auditto make an impression = to create an impression

Aspectual constructions into single verbs to launch an attack = to attack



Adverbials (compounds into single adverbs)in a constructive way = constructivelyon purpose > purposely = deliberately

Relatives into participial adjectivesthe president that was elected = the president elect

Relatives into possessivesthe role that Europe plays/has = the role of Europethe position that the Church defends = the position of the Church

Relatives into compound nouns (and vice-versa)a container for the milk = a milk containera bottle made of plastic = a plastic bottle

Agentive passives into activesthe young man is released by the police officer = the police officer

releases the young man


PARAPHRASES COVERED BY REWRITER


REWRITER (V0.1)INTERFACE FOR THE PUBLIC SERVICE

Interactive ReWriterfor word processing applications,

such as text editing



REWRITER (V0.1)SUGGESTIONS FOR EXAMPLE

SENTENCESSuggestions for general language

linguistic phenomena

Compound adverbs > single adverbs

Support verb constructions > single verbs

Relatives > participial adjectives



REWRITER (V0.1)USER’S CAPABILITY TO ADD NEW

REWRITING OPTIONS

The user can suggest new words or expressions (synonyms or paraphrases)



REWRITER (V0.2)COMMERCIAL INTERFACE -

PROTOTYPEUsers can select among general and technical dictionaries (more than one

selection allowed), grammars for specific linguistic transformations (one, several or all grammars can be selected). The interface provides sample texts for testing.

Sample LEGAL text

Informative details about the linguistic resources selected




PROTOTYPE

Identification of legal terms in the text

Suggestions for the term “breach of law”

Users can select one term on the list of suggestions or provide a new suggestion




PROTOTYPE

Text rewritten• In red, the expressions in the source text

• In green, suggestions provided by ReWriter and selected by the user

It is possible to go back and change the user option as many times as necessary


LINGUISTIC RESOURCES USED BY REWRITER

Eng4NooJ – linguistic knowledge database

•OpenLogos dictionary (http://logos-os.dfki.de/) – commercial version belongs to GROUP Business Software, Germany

•converted into NooJ format, and enhanced with new properties, including derivational and morpho-syntactic and semantic relations

Allows linguistic annotation and processing of corpora

Instrument for empirical testbed to support theoretical linguistics research

Basis for language technology applications, including machine translation between several languages

Sample of Dictionary of Legal Terms


http://logos-os.dfki.de/


Sample of terms classified as Information +

Instructional/legal




NDRV04 = <B>ion/Npred+NomADRV02 = <B>icableAVDRV01 = <E>ly/ADVAVDRV04 = <B>tically/ADV

impress,V+FLX=POLISH+SAL=PVPCpleasetype+PT=impressionar+DRV=NDRV01:BOOK+VSUP=make+VSUP=cause+NPREP=onaesthetic,AFLX=NATURAL+SAL=AVstate+PT=aesthetically+DRV=AVDRV03skepticism,N+FLX=BOOK+SAL=ABcause+PT=cepticismo+DRV=NAVDRV02

Grammar to recognize adverbial compounds and transform them into equivalent single adverbs

Rules to transform morpho-syntactically

and semantically related words of different parts of

speech

General language dictionary entries


Morpho-syntactic and semantic

relations


EVALUATION RESULTS: PARAPHRASING PRECISION


SVC Recognition

Precision SVC Recognition

Recall SVC Paraphrasing

Precision Pôr 73/73 - 100% 73/100 – 73% 72/73 - 98.6% Tomar 75/75 - 100% 75/100 – 75% 68/73 - 93.1% Ter 65/65 - 100% 65/100 – 65% 59/65 - 90.7% Dar 57/60 - 95% 57/100 – 57% 46/51 - 90.1% Fazer 43/45 – 95.5% 43/100 – 43% 40/45 - 88.8% Average 62.6/63.6 - 98.4% 62.6/100 - 62.6% 57/61 - 93.4%

Evaluation of recognition and paraphrasing

of support verb constructions

Corpus of fiction: 500 sentences

100 for each of 5 elementary support verbs


EVALUATION RESULTS: IMPACT ON TRANSLATABILITY (MT)


Same corpus, 50 sentences selected randomly

(i) automated pre-processing of support verb constructions with ReWriter and conversion into equivalent single verbs

(ii) pre-processed sentences (automatically generated paraphrases) and original text are submitted to MT and the output translations for both original and pre-processed sentences were compared

• 29 (58%) of the best translations were of automatically generated paraphrases• 9 (18%) were of support verb constructions • 12 (24%) were equally bad or equally good

CONCLUSIONThe experiment indicates that paraphrases such as those generated by ReWriter help improve translation scores • The automated paraphrasing of support verb constructions through ReWriter

allowed a significant improvement of the quality of the MT results in that context


TRANSFORMATIONS FOR THE NEAR FUTURE

[Popular versus technical terms]around the orbit of the eye ≡ periorbital[If clauses]if it is necessary ≡ if necessary[Passives into actives - whenever suitable]That book was written by Saramago in 2008 > Saramago wrote that book in 2008Florida was hit by a tornado > A tornado hit Florida[Coordinated noun phrases - conjoining or disjoining]linguistic resources for teaching and for research > linguistic resources for teaching and research[Subjunctive clauses - into infinitives]we ask the favor that you confirm your attendance > we ask the favor to confirm your attendance[Marked-up constructions]if the end-user need is to create controlled language text > if the end-user needs to create controlled language text[Vague and undefined or null subject sentences] (whenever the real subject/actor is known)[-] there was shouting in the street > [N-PRON]/someone shouted in the street



WHO COULD BENEFIT FROM REWRITER?

Writers in general (searching for synonyms and paraphrases)

Technical writers (searching for the “exact” term)

Editors

MT pre-editors

Translators

Learners of a second language

Students learning language and writing skills



$EN

FROM REWRITER TO MACHINE TRANSLATION


a fazer um estágio para dar aulas de / tutor Religião

a fazer um estágio para dar aulas de / lecture Religião

a fazer um estágio para dar aulas de / teach Religião

começa a dar exemplos / exemplify :

sentia-se capaz de dar um murro em / punch quem quisesse detê-logostávamos de lhe dar uma palavrinha / speak .


IMPROVEMENT OF REWRITER

Writing (pedagogical) exercises – students learning how to improve their writing skills in a native or foreign language

Professional writers and translators using (and testing) the tool, marking [informal], [idiomatic], [slang] and other uses of the terminology

Detection of errors (words that are not synonyms, or not in a particular context)

Define linguistic rules to improve precision in specific contexts (e.g.: [bring(vt)) N(charge; action) > present(vt) N(idem)]

Include “revision memories” (recycling validated reviewed sentences, structures or phrases)




To learn more on

paraphrases…

Soon to be released! Anabela Barreiro

[email protected]


content writing optimization with rewriter

Technology

computer conference

anabela barreiro london

rewriter rewriter v0

rewriter synonyms

high quality

linguistic resources

text processing tools

single verbsto