Anglo-Saxon English

1. King AlfredA Translation Environment for Learners of Anglo-Saxon EnglishLisa N. MichaudComputer Science DepartmentSaint Anselm CollegeManchester, NH

2. Anglo-Saxon English “Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.” “Who will believe my verse in time to come / if it were fill’d with your most high deserts?” “Whan that Aprille with his shoores soote / The drought of March hath perced to the roote…” Saint Anselm College - 2

3. King Alfred • A tutoring system for college students studying Anglo-Saxon English • Sum mann feoll on ise • Þa wurdon þa mynstermen micclum afyhrte • Primary objectives • Encourage reflection and self-directed study • Resources for the translation task Saint Anselm College - 3

4. Translating in King Alfred • Student is presented with original Anglo-Saxon text to translate • A “scratch pad” allows the user to annotate each word with syntactic features as they are decoded Saint Anselm College - 4

5. Using the Scratch Pad • Annotating syntactic features • Rich morphological cues • Not a strict word-order language • Essential clues to translation • Look-up aid • Centralized resources on translation, inflection • Annotation does not crowd translation Saint Anselm College - 5

6. Feedback for the Learner • Scratch pad annotations recorded in user model • Aggregation • Granularity? • Which category is valid / most relevant • High-level feedback for the learner King Alfred is pleased with your performance on personal pronouns. King Alfred feels you should review weak verbs. Saint Anselm College - 6

7. Feature Data • Syntactic data stored for feoll: person: 3rd number: singular mood: indicative tense: past definition: fell class: strong declension: 7th in the context of where it appeared associated with root feallan Saint Anselm College - 7

8. person text (realization) number has root mood tense text definition features declension has POS class part of speech Toward a Relational Model surface form root form Saint Anselm College - 8

9. has word number translation Toward a Relational Model surface form sentence Saint Anselm College - 9

10. A Two-Level Glossary for Learners • Learners must look up glossary data frequently • For beginners, tough to find correct word feoll  feallan • Must often look to other resources for contextual data • Glossary based on “surface” word easier Saint Anselm College - 10

11. A Two-Level Glossary for Learners • Learners look up the surface form as it appears in the text • Both surface and root data are displayed, dynamically generated • Goal: to also show inflected examples in context Saint Anselm College - 11

12. Scoring a Translation • Many variations on a translation Sum mann feoll on ise. One man fell on the ice. A man fell on the ice. One man fell on ice. Some man fell on the ice. Somemen fell on ice. One man fell on the island. • Can we automatically evaluate these? Saint Anselm College - 12

13. Automatic Translation Scoring • BLEU score (Papineni et al, 2002) • Machine Translation • Source text Þa wurdon þa mynstermen micclum afyhrte. • Reference translation(s) Then the monks became greatly frightened. The monks then became much afraid. • Evaluation of candidate translation • By a human (expensive, slow) • Automatically (desirable) Saint Anselm College - 13

14. Flexibility in Translation • Multiple acceptable choices in translation • Unigram precision: word choice Candidate: afraid Reference #1: frightened Reference #2: afraid • N-gram precision: word order Candidate: The monks became then Reference #1: The monks became then Reference #2: Then the monks became Saint Anselm College - 14

15. Adapting n-Gram Precision • Ignorant of grammatical data • Can only match surface realizations • Reliance on diversity of reference translations • Ignores close mismatches • Insufficient for pedagogical application • Cause of mismatch is important Saint Anselm College - 15

16. Adapting n-Gram Precision • Part of speech information on each source word Þa wurdon þa mynstermen micclum afyhrte. adv v det n adv adj Saint Anselm College - 16

17. Adapting n-Gram Precision • Contextual translation links it to target word in reference translation Þa wurdon þa mynstermen micclum afyhrte. adv v det n adv adj Then became the monks greatly frightened Saint Anselm College - 17

18. Adapting n-Gram Precision • English synonyms available in free databases (WordNet) Þa wurdon þa mynstermen micclum afyhrte. adv v det n adv adj Then became the monks greatly frightened very scared afraid Saint Anselm College - 18

19. Adapting n-Gram Precision • King Alfred’s grammatical ontology holds alternative translations Þa wurdon þa mynstermen micclum afyhrte. adv v det n adv adj Then became the monks greatly frightened wurdon  weorðan (verb): to become, to happen • Other surface forms occurring in the corpus have inflected (mis)translations Saint Anselm College - 19

20. A Pedagogically Motivated Score • Acceptable: • Insertion/exclusion of optional words (the) • Words with flexible placement (then) • Use of synonym in translation (afraid) • Neutral: • Selection of alternative (incorrect) translation • Poor: • Incorrect (unrelated) root translation • Misinterpreted morphology Saint Anselm College - 20

21. Improved interface Hiding the menus Only annotations displayed Multi-sentential translations Morphological engine Custom lessons on inflection Other exercise formats Fill in the blank Choose the correctly inflected version For the Future Saint Anselm College - 21

22. Acknowledgments • Wheaton College Associate Professor of English Michael Drout • Grants from the Davis, Gebbie, and Mars Foundations, and the Emily C. Hood Fund for the Arts and Sciences • Student collaborators: • David Dudek • Rachel Kappelle • Joseph Lavoine Saint Anselm College - 22