Pamela Toman

Tag: poster

Hybrid Word-Character Neural Machine Translation for Arabic

My final project for Stanford CS 224N was on hybrid word-character machine translation for Arabic.

Traditional models of neural machine translation make the false-but-true-in-English assumption that words are essentially equivalent to units of meaning. Morphologically rich languages disobey this assumption. We implement a hybrid translation model that backs off unknown words to a representation created by modeling their constituent characters in TensorFlow, we apply the model to Arabic translation, and approach state-of-the-art performance for Arabic over the weeks allotted for a class project.

Hybrid Word-Character Neural Machine Translation for Arabic was published on 25 March 2017.

Tags: graduate-school, mle, poster, research, arabic, nlp

Automatic sign language identification

My final project for Stanford CS 231N was on automatically identifying sign languages from publicly licensed YouTube clips. For this project I learned from scratch about working with neural networks, computer vision, and video data.

Automatic processing of sign languages can only recently potentially advance beyond the toy problem of fingerspelling recognition. In just the last few years, we have leaped forward in our understanding of sign language theory, effective computer vision practices, and large-scale availability of data. This project achieves better-than-human performance on sign language identification, and it releases a dataset and benchmark for future work on the topic. It is intended as a precursor to sign language machine translation.

Automatic sign language identification was published on 30 March 2016.

Tags: graduate-school, mle, sign-language, research, poster, nlp