Michael Denkowski

My research focuses on improving the quality of statistical translation between human languages. I work with Alon Lavie in the AVENUE machine translation group on topics including MT for human translators (post-editing), automatic metrics for system optimization and evaluation, and building large scale systems. See below for a list of software I've worked on or take a look at my github page.

Meteor Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation System
[webpage] [github] [GNU LGPL]
Alignment-based MT evaluation metric with extended support for several target languages. The current version includes paraphrase tables for six languages as well as tools for visualizing alignments and score distributions.

Quality Estimation-inspired Parallel Data Cleaning
[README] [github] [GNU LGPL]
Select the most reliable data from large parallel corpora using fast, simple features from MT quality estimation. Qe-clean was used to clean parallel data for our WMT systems in 2012 and 2013.

TransCenter Web-Based Translation Research Suite
[webpage] [github] [GNU LGPL]
TransCenter allows you to efficiently collect and analyze human translation data over the web. TransCenter server is easy to deploy and maintain. The web-based translation editor allows translators to work on translation tasks from any computer with an Internet connection. All user activity is logged so you can view detailed translation reports.

Parex Paraphrase Extractor
[github] [GNU LGPL]
Simple tool for extracting paraphrases from parallel corpora using phrase tables, includes support for language-independent filtering. Parex was used to build the Meteor paraphrase tables.

M. Denkowski and A. Lavie, "Challenges in Predicting Machine Translation Utility for Human Post-Editors" Proceedings of AMTA, 2012
[PDF] [bib] [slides]

M. Denkowski, G. Hanneman, A. Lavie, "The CMU-Avenue French-English Translation System", Proceedings of the NAACL 2012 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, 2012
[PDF] [bib]
•★ Win and constrained win in shared translation task

M. Denkowski and A. Lavie, "Meteor 1.3 Automatic Metric for Reliable Optimization and Evaluation of Machine Translation Systems", Proceedings of the EMNLP 2011 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, 2011
[PDF] [bib]
• Tunable metrics task win in WMT11
★ Segment level win (or tied) for into and out-of English tasks in WMT12

M. Denkowski and A. Lavie, "Choosing the Right Evaluation for Machine Translation: an Examination of Annotator and Automatic Metric Performance on Human Judgment Tasks", Proceedings of AMTA, 2010
[PDF] [slides]

M. Denkowski and A. Lavie, "METEOR-NEXT and the METEOR Paraphrase Tables: Improved Evaluation Support For Five Target Languages", Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Joint Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and Metrics MATR, 2010
[PDF] [bib]

M. Denkowski, H. Al-Haj, A. Lavie, "Turker-Assisted Paraphrasing for English-Arabic Machine Translation", Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data With Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, 2010
[PDF] [bib]

M. Denkowski and A. Lavie, "Exploring Normalization Techniques for Human Judgments of Machine Translation Adequacy Collected Using Amazon Mechanical Turk", Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data With Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, 2010
[PDF] [bib]

M. Denkowski and A. Lavie, "Extending the METEOR Machine Translation Evaluation Metric to the Phrase Level", Proceedings of NAACL/HLT, 2010
[PDF] [bib]

Lavie, Agarwal, Denkowski, Snover, Madnani, Dorr, Schwartz, Habash, Kahn, Ostendorf, Roark, Kulick, Marcus, Pado, Galley, Manning, "Searching for Better Automatic MT Metrics", Handbook of Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation, 2011

M. Denkowski and A. Lavie, "TransCenter: Web-Based Translation Research Suite", AMTA 2012 Workshop on Post-Editing Technology and Practice Demo Session, 2012
[PDF] [bib]

M. Denkowski and A. Lavie, "METEOR-Tuned Phrase-Based SMT: CMU French-English and Haitian-English Systems for WMT 2011", Technical Report CMU-LTI-11-011, Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2011
[PDF] [bib]

M. Denkowski, "A Survey of Techniques for Unsupervised Word Sense Induction", Language & Statistics II Literature Review, Fall 2009
[PDF]