Content Writing Optimization with ReWriter

CONTENT WRITING
OPTIMIZATION WITH REWRITER
Anabela Barreiro
ab@metatrad.com
Translating and the Computer Conference 2010
Anabela Barreiro London, 18-19 November 2010

OUTLINE
 LINGUISTIC QUALITY ASSURANCE
 HOW TO ACHIEVE WRITING OPTIMIZATION
 REWRITER
 PARAPHRASES COVERED BY REWRITER
 REWRITER V0.1 AND V0.2 – INTERFACE AND MODUS OPERANDI
 LINGUISTIC RESOURCES USED BY REWRITER
 EVALUATION RESULTS
 TRANSFORMATIONS FOR THE NEAR FUTURE
 WHO COULD BENEFIT FROM REWRITER?
 FROM REWRITER TO MACHINE TRANSLATION
 IMPROVEMENT OF REWRITER

LINGUISTIC QUALITY ASSURANCE
 Reassures that a certain level of linguistic quality is guaranteed in texts
 Uses techniques to verify the quality of specialized documentation
 Helps individuals/businesses connect with their target audience in a clear
and understandable way by achieving:
• strategic, high quality, meaningful content
• relevant content written and optimized specifically for a particular
purpose (or for a particular business)
• custom content (relevant keywords and adequate terminologies)
• original texts (creative writing) or domain specific texts (technical
writing)
• readable / publishable content

LINGUISTIC QUALITY ASSURANCE
 Professional text writing and revision
• Orthographic, grammatical, stylistic and terminological verification of
the technical documents
• Use of tools
 Spell and grammar checkers
 Writing/authoring aids
 Style guides
 Terminologies (technical domains)
 Controlled language
• Consistent, direct, and simple language
• Restricted grammar (avoid certain types of construction)
• Avoid complex reasoning, figures of speech, metaphors, etc.
• Elimination of wordiness

HOW TO ACHIEVE WRITING
OPTIMIZATION
 Synonymy
 Stylistics
 PARAPHRASING
• effective in helping writers with writing difficulties or learners of a non-
native language (pedagogical exercise)
• essential component in the translation process and of an extreme value
to machine translation pre-editing
• can be employed in linguistic quality assurance for both source and
target texts
For the past few years, researchers have been trying to achieve
automated paraphrasing to respond to the commercial enterprises’ wish
to include paraphrases in their text processing tools, authoring
aids, learning tools, etc.

REWRITER – PARAPHRASING TOOL
 authoring aid (word processing applications)
 Language composition tool
 Text production and style editor
 Empirical testbed for linguistic quality assurance (source and target texts)
 text (pre-)editing (machine translation)
 “Revision memory” tool (≈ “translation memory”)
 Applicable to general and technical language
(e.g. student texts or legal texts)
Portuguese version “ReEscreve” - publicly available service at:
http://www.linguateca.pt/ReEscreve/
Soon to be integrated in a cyber school project – “Ciberescola”

PARAPHRASES COVERED BY REWRITER
 Synonyms in context (ex: phrasal verbs into equivalent expressions)
to clear up (weather) = (weather) to become better/brighter
 Support verb constructions into single verbs
to make a decision = to decide
make a presentation of = present
to give support to N(AN) = to support N(AN)
to go V-ing = to continue V-ing
to get into contact with = to contact
to turn on N(light) = to extinguish N(light)
to become acid = to acidify
 Support verb constructions into their stylistic variants
to make an audit = to perform an audit
to make an impression = to create an impression
 Aspectual constructions into single verbs
to launch an attack = to attack

 Adverbials (compounds into single adverbs)
in a constructive way = constructively
on purpose > purposely = deliberately
 Relatives into participial adjectives
the president that was elected = the president elect
 Relatives into possessives
the role that Europe plays/has = the role of Europe
the position that the Church defends = the position of the Church
 Relatives into compound nouns (and vice-versa)
a container for the milk = a milk container
a bottle made of plastic = a plastic bottle
 Agentive passives into actives
the young man is released by the police officer = the police officer releases
the young man
PARAPHRASES COVERED BY REWRITER

REWRITER (V0.1)
INTERFACE FOR THE PUBLIC SERVICE
Interactive ReWriter
for word processing applications,
such as text editing

REWRITER (V0.1)
SUGGESTIONS FOR EXAMPLE SENTENCES
Suggestions for general language
linguistic phenomena
Compound adverbs >
single adverbs
Support verb constructions >
single verbs
Relatives >
participial adjectives

REWRITER (V0.1)
USER’S CAPABILITY TO ADD NEW
REWRITING OPTIONS
The user can suggest new words or
expressions (synonyms or paraphrases)

REWRITER (V0.2)
COMMERCIAL INTERFACE - PROTOTYPE
Users can select among general and technical dictionaries (more than one
selection allowed), grammars for specific linguistic transformations (one, several
or all grammars can be selected). The interface provides sample texts for testing.
Sample LEGAL text
Informative details about the
linguistic resources selected

REWRITER (V0.2)
Identification of legal terms in the text
Suggestions for the term “breach of law”
Users can select one term on the list of suggestions or provide a new suggestion

REWRITER (V0.2)
Text rewritten
• In red, the expressions in the source text
• In green, suggestions provided by ReWriter and selected by the user
It is possible to go back and change the
user option as many times as necessary

LINGUISTIC RESOURCES USED BY REWRITER
 Eng4NooJ – linguistic knowledge database
• OpenLogos dictionary (http://logos-os.dfki.de/) – commercial version
belongs to GROUP Business Software, Germany
• converted into NooJ format, and enhanced with new properties, including
derivational and morpho-syntactic and semantic relations
 Allows linguistic annotation and processing of corpora
 Instrument for empirical testbed to support theoretical linguistics
research
 Basis for language technology applications, including machine
translation between several languages
 Sample of Dictionary of Legal Terms

Sample of terms classified
as Information +
Instructional/legal

NDRV04 = <B>ion/Npred+Nom
ADRV02 = <B>icable
AVDRV01 = <E>ly/ADV
AVDRV04 = <B>tically/ADV
impress,V+FLX=POLISH+SAL=PVPCpleasetype+PT=impressionar+DRV=NDRV01:BOOK+
VSUP=make+VSUP=cause+NPREP=on
aesthetic,AFLX=NATURAL+SAL=AVstate+PT=aesthetically+DRV=AVDRV03
skepticism,N+FLX=BOOK+SAL=ABcause+PT=cepticismo+DRV=NAVDRV02
Grammar to recognize adverbial compounds and
transform them into equivalent single adverbs
Rules to transform
morpho-syntactically
and semantically
related words of
different parts of
speech
General language dictionary entries
Morpho-syntactic
and semantic
relations

EVALUATION RESULTS: PARAPHRASING
PRECISION
SVC Recognition
Precision
SVC Recognition
Recall
SVC Paraphrasing
Precision
Pôr 73/73 - 100% 73/100 – 73% 72/73 - 98.6%
Tomar 75/75 - 100% 75/100 – 75% 68/73 - 93.1%
Ter 65/65 - 100% 65/100 – 65% 59/65 - 90.7%
Dar 57/60 - 95% 57/100 – 57% 46/51 - 90.1%
Fazer 43/45 – 95.5% 43/100 – 43% 40/45 - 88.8%
Average 62.6/63.6 - 98.4% 62.6/100 - 62.6% 57/61 - 93.4%
Evaluation of recognition and paraphrasing
of support verb constructions
Corpus of fiction: 500 sentences
100 for each of 5 elementary support verbs

EVALUATION RESULTS: IMPACT ON
TRANSLATABILITY (MT)
Same corpus, 50 sentences selected randomly
(i) automated pre-processing of support verb constructions with ReWriter and
conversion into equivalent single verbs
(ii) pre-processed sentences (automatically generated paraphrases) and original text
are submitted to MT and the output translations for both original and pre-processed
sentences were compared
• 29 (58%) of the best translations were of automatically generated paraphrases
• 9 (18%) were of support verb constructions
• 12 (24%) were equally bad or equally good
CONCLUSION
The experiment indicates that paraphrases such as those generated by ReWriter
help improve translation scores
• The automated paraphrasing of support verb constructions through ReWriter
allowed a significant improvement of the quality of the MT results in that context

TRANSFORMATIONS FOR THE NEAR FUTURE
[Popular versus technical terms]
around the orbit of the eye ≡ periorbital
[If clauses]
if it is necessary ≡ if necessary
[Passives into actives - whenever suitable]
That book was written by Saramago in 2008 > Saramago wrote that book in 2008
Florida was hit by a tornado > A tornado hit Florida
[Coordinated noun phrases - conjoining or disjoining]
linguistic resources for teaching and for research > linguistic resources for teaching and research
[Subjunctive clauses - into infinitives]
we ask the favor that you confirm your attendance > we ask the favor to confirm your attendance
[Marked-up constructions]
if the end-user need is to create controlled language text > if the end-user needs to create
controlled language text
[Vague and undefined or null subject sentences] (whenever the real subject/actor is known)
[-] there was shouting in the street > [N-PRON]/someone shouted in the street

WHO COULD BENEFIT FROM REWRITER?
 Writers in general (searching for synonyms and paraphrases)
 Technical writers (searching for the “exact” term)
 Editors
 MT pre-editors
 Translators
 Learners of a second language
 Students learning language and writing skills

$EN
FROM REWRITER TO MACHINE
TRANSLATION
a fazer um estágio para dar aulas de / tutor Religião
a fazer um estágio para dar aulas de / lecture Religião
a fazer um estágio para dar aulas de / teach Religião
começa a dar exemplos / exemplify :
sentia-se capaz de dar um murro em / punch quem quisesse detê-lo
gostávamos de lhe dar uma palavrinha / speak .

IMPROVEMENT OF REWRITER
 Writing (pedagogical) exercises – students learning how to improve
their writing skills in a native or foreign language
 Professional writers and translators using (and testing) the
tool, marking [informal], [idiomatic], [slang] and other uses of the
terminology
 Detection of errors (words that are not synonyms, or not in a
particular context)
 Define linguistic rules to improve precision in specific contexts (e.g.:
[bring(vt)) N(charge; action) > present(vt) N(idem)]
 Include “revision memories” (recycling validated reviewed
sentences, structures or phrases)

To learn more
on
paraphrases…
Soon to be
released!Anabela Barreiro
ab@metatrad.com

Content Writing Optimization with ReWriter

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