King AlfredA Translation Environment for

Learners of Anglo-Saxon English

Lisa N. Michaud Computer Science Department

Saint Anselm CollegeManchester, NH

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Anglo-Saxon English

“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…”

“Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.”

Old English Middle English

Modern English

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King Alfred

A tutoring system for college students studying Anglo-Saxon English

Sum mann feoll on iseÞa wurdon þa mynstermen micclum afyhrte

Primary objectivesEncourage reflection and self-directed studyResources for the translation task

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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

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Using the Scratch Pad

Annotating syntactic featuresRich morphological cuesNot a strict word-order languageEssential clues to translation

Look-up aidCentralized resources on translation, inflectionAnnotation does not crowd translation

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Feedback for the Learner

Scratch pad annotations recorded in user model

AggregationGranularity?Which category is valid / most relevant

High-level feedback for the learnerKing Alfred is pleased with your performance

on personal pronouns.King Alfred feels you should review weak

verbs.

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Feature Data

Syntactic data stored for feoll:person: 3rd

number: singular

mood: indicative

tense: past

definition: fell

class: strong

declension: 7th

in the contextof where itappeared

associatedwith root

feallan

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Toward a Relational Model

surface form

root form

text (realization)

hasroot

hasPOS

part of speech

features

definition

text

declension

class

person

number

mood

tense

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Toward a Relational Model

sentence

hasword

number

translation

surface form

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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

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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

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Scoring a Translation

Many variations on a translationSum 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.Some men fell on ice.One man fell on the island.

Can we automatically evaluate these?

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Automatic Translation Scoring

BLEU score (Papineni et al, 2002)Machine Translation

Source textÞa wurdon þa mynstermen micclum afyhrte.Reference translation(s)Then the monks became greatly frightened.The monks then became much afraid.

Evaluation of candidate translationBy a human (expensive, slow)Automatically (desirable)

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Flexibility in Translation

Multiple acceptable choices in translation

Unigram precision: word choiceCandidate: afraidReference #1: frightenedReference #2: afraid

N-gram precision: word orderCandidate: The monks became thenReference #1: The monks became thenReference #2: Then the monks became

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Adapting n-Gram Precision

Ignorant of grammatical data

Can only match surface realizationsReliance on diversity of reference translationsIgnores close mismatches

Insufficient for pedagogical application

Cause of mismatch is important

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Adapting n-Gram Precision

Part of speech information on each source word

Þa wurdon þa mynstermen micclum afyhrte.

adv v det n adv adj

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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 adjThen became the monks greatly

frightened

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Adapting n-Gram Precision

English synonyms available in free databases (WordNet)

Þa wurdon þa mynstermen micclum afyhrte.

adv v det n adv adjThen became the monks greatly

frightened

very scared

afraid

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Adapting n-Gram Precision

King Alfred’s grammatical ontology holds alternative translations

Þa wurdon þa mynstermen micclum afyhrte.adv v det n adv adjThen became the monks greatly frightened

wurdon weorðan (verb): to become, to happen

Other surface forms occurring in the corpus have inflected (mis)translations

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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 translationMisinterpreted morphology

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For the Future

Improved interfaceHiding the menusOnly annotations displayed

Multi-sentential translations

Morphological engineCustom lessons on inflection

Other exercise formatsFill in the blankChoose the correctly inflected version

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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 DudekRachel KappelleJoseph Lavoine