Information
Research
My research at CMU focused on improving the quality of statistical machine translation between human languages. I worked with Alon Lavie on topics including MT for human translators (post-editing), automatic metrics for system optimization and evaluation, and building large scale systems.
Software
Realtime Adaptive Machine Translation for Human Translators (cdec-realtime)
[github]
[Apache License]
Machine translation that learns from human feedback. Uses incremental post-editing data to
update translation models, language models, and feature weights with minimal approximation.
Meteor Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation System
[webpage] [github] [GNU LGPL]
Alignment-based MT evaluation metric with extended support for any target language as well as
tools for visualizing alignments and score distributions.
TransCenter Web-Based Translation Research Suite
[github] [GNU LGPL]
Connects users to adaptive MT systems and logs all editing activity for detailed analysis.
TransCenter server is easy to deploy and the web-based interface allows translators to work from
any computer with an Internet connection.
Quality Estimation-inspired Parallel Data Cleaning
[github] [GNU LGPL]
Selects the most reliable data from large parallel corpora using fast, simple features from MT
quality estimation. Used to clean parallel data for our WMT systems in 2012 and ß2013.
Parex Paraphrase Extractor
Simple tool for extracting paraphrases from parallel corpora using phrase tables, including
support for language-independent filtering. Used to build the Meteor paraphrase tables. Parex is
now included in Meteor.
Select Publications
Michael Denkowski, "Machine Translation for Human Translators"
Ph.D. Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, April 2015. Committee: Alon Lavie; Chris Dyer;
Jaime Carbonell; Gregory Shreve
[PDF]
[bib]
[slides]
Michael Denkowski; Alon Lavie,
"Meteor Universal: Language Specific Translation Evaluation for Any Target Language",
Proceedings of the ACL 2014 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, 2014
[PDF]
[bib]
[poster]
Michael Denkowski; Alon Lavie; Isabel Lacruz; Chris Dyer,
"Real Time Adaptive Machine Translation for Post-Editing with cdec and TransCenter"
Proceedings of the EACL 2014 Workshop on Humans and Computer-assisted Translation, 2014
[PDF]
[bib]
[poster]
Michael Denkowski; Chris Dyer; Alon Lavie;
"Learning from Post-Editing: Online Model Adaptation for Statistical Machine Translation"
Proceedings of EACL, 2014
[PDF]
[bib]
[poster]
Michael Denkowski, "Machine Translation for Human Translators"
Ph.D. Thesis Proposal, Carnegie Mellon University, May 2013. Committee: Alon Lavie; Chris
Dyer; Jaime Carbonell; Gregory Shreve
[PDF]
[bib]
[slides]
Michael Denkowski; Alon Lavie,
"Challenges in Predicting Machine Translation Utility for Human Post-Editors"
Proceedings of AMTA, 2012
[PDF]
[bib]
[slides]
Michael Denkowski; Greg Hanneman; Alon Lavie,
"The CMU-Avenue French-English Translation System",
Proceedings of the NAACL 2012 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, 2012
[PDF]
[bib]
Michael Denkowski; Alon 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]
Michael Denkowski; Alon 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]
Michael Denkowski; Alon 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]
Michael Denkowski; Hassan Al-Haj; Alon 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]
Michael Denkowski; Alon 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]
Michael Denkowski; Alon Lavie,
"Extending the METEOR Machine Translation Evaluation Metric to the Phrase Level",
Proceedings of NAACL/HLT, 2010
[PDF]
[bib]
Reports
Michael Denkowski; Alon Lavie,
"TransCenter: Web-Based Translation Research Suite",
AMTA 2012 Workshop on Post-Editing Technology and Practice Demo Session, 2012
[PDF]
[bib]
Michael Denkowski; Alon 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]
Michael Denkowski, "A Survey of Techniques for Unsupervised Word Sense Induction",
Language & Statistics II Literature Review, Fall 2009
[PDF]