Hoorcollege 8 Translation 1: language diversity

Question 1

What makes translation difficult?

Answer 1

• Same word in different contexts in one language can be a different one in another language

Structural differences
* Semantic maps: Expresses regularities on the expression of meaning accross language
* Lexical typology: Some languages are more specific about differences than others

Question 2

Grammatical categories

Answer 2

• Gender
• Dual / Plural distinction or singular / plurar distionction
• Inclusitivity (talking about you or others)

WALS : World atlas of language structures

Question 3

Word order (Subject, Object and verb)

Answer 3

Dutch: No dominant order
* vaag verhaal van joseph universal26 / universal 18

Left branching - Right branching:
* Object Verb | Verb object
* Adjective Noun | Noun adjective

Question 4

Word order correlations

Answer 4

Correlating orders more efficient at coding information, incl. about syntactic stucture

Question 5

Encoder-decoder architecture

Answer 5

Encoder -> context -> decoder (numeric functions)

• Final hidden state of encoder is the context, but this creates a bottleneck (all sentences
  compressed into a vector)
• Models can use (cross-) attention where the decoder decides how much attention a
  hidden layer gets?

Question 6

No teacher forcing

Answer 6

training to predict the next word and teacher forcing is predicting the
next word