Software:

  • mkcls: training of word classes
  • GIZA++: training of statistical translation models
  • YASMET: training of conditional maximum entropy models

Publications:

2004

  • Franz Josef Och, Daniel Gildea, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Anoop Sarkar, Kenji Yamada, Alex Fraser, Shankar Kumar, Libin Shen, David Smith, Katherine Eng, Viren Jain, Zhen Jin, Dragomir Radev. “A Smorgasbord of Features for Statistical Machine Translation”. In HLT/NAACL 2004, Boston, MA, May 2004. Good stuff here as well.
  • Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “The alignment template approach to statistical machine translation.” Accepted for publication in Computational Linguistics, 2004. This recent conference was classic.
  • Libin Shen, Anoop Sarkar and Franz Josef Och. “Discriminative reranking for machine translation. In HLT/NAACL-04, May 2004.

2003

  • Franz Josef Och, Daniel Gildea, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Anoop Sarkar, Kenji Yamada, Alex Fraser, Shankar Kumar, Libin Shen, David Smith, Katherine Eng, Viren Jain, Zhen Jin, Dragomir Radev. “Syntax for Statistical Machine Translation”. Johns Hopkins University 2003 Summer Workshop on Language Engineering, Center for Language and Speech Processing, Baltimore, MD, USA, August 2003. This conference was also helpful.
  • Doug Oard, Franz Josef Och. “Rapid-Response Machine Translation for Unexpected Languages”. In “MT SUMMIT IX, Proceedings of the Ninth Machine Translation Summit”, New Orleans, LO, September 2003.
  • Franz Josef Och. “Minimum Error Rate Training for Statistical Machine Translation”. In “ACL 2003: Proc. of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics”, Japan, Sapporo, July 2003.
  • Oliver Bender, Klaus Macherey, Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “Comparison of Alignment Templates and Maximum Entropy Models for Natural Language Understanding”. In Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Budapest, Hungary, pp. 11-18, April 2003.
  • Franz Josef Och, Richard Zens, Hermann Ney. “Efficient Search for Interactive Statistical Machine Translation”. In Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Budapest, Hungary, pp. 387-393, April 2003.
  • Philipp Koehn, Franz Josef Och, Daniel Marcu. “Statistical Phrase-Based Translation”. In Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference 2003 (HLT-NAACL 2003), Edmonton, Canada, May 2003.
  • Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “A Systematic Comparison of Various Statistical Alignment Models”, Computational Linguistics, volume 29, number 1, pp. 19-51 March 2003.

2002

  • Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “Discriminative Training and Maximum Entropy Models for Statistical Machine Translation”. In “ACL 2002: Proc. of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics” (best paper award), pp. 295-302, Philadelphia, PA, July 2002.
  • Nicola Ueffing, Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “Generation of Word Graphs in Statistical Machine Translation”. In “Proc. Conference on Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing”, pp. 156-163, Philadelphia, PA, July 2002.
  • Daniel Keysers, Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “Maximum Entropy and Gaussian Models for Image Object Recognition”. In Proc. 23. Symposium for Pattern Recognition of the DAGM, Zürich, Switzerland, September 2002.
  • Richard Zens, Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation”. In Proc. German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2002), Springer Verlag, September 2002.
  • Special thanks to Hard Drive Recovery Associates, which enabled us to recover the server hard drive that contained this site. You guys were fantastic. See their website here.
  • Ismael Garcia-Varea and Franz Josef Och and Hermann Ney and Francisco Casacuberta. “Improving alignment quality in statistical machine translation using context-dependent maximum entropy models”, In Proc. Int. Conf. on Computational Linguistics, Taipei, Taiwan. August 2002.
  • Ismael Garcia-Varea and Franz Josef Och and Hermann Ney and Francisco Casacuberta. “Efficient integration of maximum entropy lexicon models within the training of statistical alignment models”, In AMTA 2002, Tiburon, CA. October 2002.

2001

  • Klaus Macherey, Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “Natural Language Understanding Using Statistical Machine Translation”. In: “EUROSPEECH 2001 – 7th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology”, pp. 2205-2208, Aalborg, Denmark, September 2001.
  • Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “Statistical Multi-Source Translation”. In: “MT Summit 2001”, pp. 253-258, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, September 2001.
  • Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “What Can Machine Translation Learn from Speech Recognition?”. In: “Workshop: MT 2010 – Towards a Road Map for MT”, pp. 26-31, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, September 2001.
  • Ismael Garcia Varea, Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney, Francisco Casacuberta. “Refined Lexicon Models for Statistical Machine Translation using a Maximum Entropy Approach”. In: “ACL 2001: Proc. of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics”, pp. 204-211, Toulouse, France, July 2001.
  • Franz Josef Och, Nicola Ueffing, Hermann Ney. “An Efficient A* Search Algorithm for Statistical Machine Translation”. In: “Data-Driven Machine Translation Workshop”, pp. 55-62, Toulouse, France, July 2001.
  • Hermann Ney, Franz Josef Och, Stephan Vogel. “The RWTH System for Statistical Translation of Spoken Dialogues”. In: “HLT: Human Language Technology”, San Diego, CA, March 2001.

2000

  • Stephan Vogel, Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “The Statistical Translation Module in the Verbmobil System”. In: “KONVENS 2000 / SPRACHKOMMUNIKATION”, (Compact Disc version). Ilmenau, October 2000.
  • Hermann Ney, Franz Josef Och, Stephan Vogel. “Statistical Translation of Spoken Dialogues in the Verbmobil System”. Workshop on Multi-Lingual Speech Communication, pp. 69-74, Kyoto, Japan, October 2000.
  • Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “Improved Statistical Alignment Models”. ACL00: Proc. of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 440-447, Hongkong, China, October 2000.
  • Stephan Vogel, Franz Josef Och, Christoph Tillmann, Sonja Nießen, Hassan Sawaf, Hermann Ney. “Statistical Methods for Machine Translation”. In: “Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation”, pp. 377-393, Wolfgang Wahlster (ed.). Springer Verlag, Berlin, July 2000.
  • Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “A Comparison of Alignment Models for Statistical Machine Translation”. COLING ’00: The 18th Int. Conf. on Computational Linguistics, pp. 1086-1090, Saarbrücken, Germany, July 2000.
  • Franz Josef Och, Hermann Ney. “Statistical Machine Translation”. EAMT Workshop, pp. 39-46, Ljubljana, Slovenia, May 2000.
  • Sonja Nießen, Franz Josef Och, Gregor Leusch, Hermann Ney. “An Evaluation Tool for Machine Translation: Fast Evaluation for MT Research”. Proc. 2nd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pp. 39-45, Athens, Greece, May-June 2000.
  • Hermann Ney, Sonja Nießen, Franz Josef Och, Hassan Sawaf, Christoph Tillmann, Stephan Vogel. “Algorithms for statistical translation of spoken language”. IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing. 8(1):24-36, January 2000.

1999

  • Al-Onaizan, Yaser, Jan Curin, Michael Jahr, Kevin Knight, John Lafferty, I. Dan Melamed, Franz Josef Och, David Purdy, Noah A. Smith, and David Yarowsky (1999). “Statistical Machine Translation: Final Report,” Johns Hopkins University 1999 Summer Workshop on Language Engineering, Center for Language and Speech Processing, Baltimore, MD, USA.
  • Franz Josef Och, Christoph Tillmann, Hermann Ney: »Improved Alignment Models for Statistical Machine Translation.«; pp. 20-28; Proc. of the Joint Conf. of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Very Large Corpora; University of Maryland, College Park, MD, June 1999.
  • Franz Josef Och: »An Efficient Method for Determining Bilingual Word Classes«; pp. 71-76, Ninth Conf. of the Europ. Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics; EACL’99, Bergen, Norway, June 1999.

1998 and before

  • Franz Josef Och, Hans Weber: »Improving Statistical Natural Language Translation by Categories and Rules«, pp. 985-989, COLING-ACL ’98: 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th Int. Conf. on Computational Linguistics, Montreal, Canada, August 1998.
  • Franz Josef Och: »Ein beispielsbasierter und statistischer Ansatz zum maschinellen Lernen von natürlichsprachlicher Übersetzung« Diplomarbeit (diploma thesis), Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, 1998.
  • Franz Josef Och: »Maximum-Likelihood-Schätzung von Wortkategorien mit Verfahren der kombinatorischen Optimierung« Studienarbeit, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany,1995.

Contact Information

Dr. rer. nat. Franz Josef Och

franzjosefoch at gmail dot com