Arul Menezes is a member of the Natural Language Processing group.

Background Information

My research interests lie in using parsed representations of natural language, including dependency trees, logical form and other abstract representations to address problems in Machine Translation, Question Answering, summarization, NL dialog, command-and-control and language-based reasoning tasks. In the past few years this has meant mostly Machine Translation, with occasional hit-and-run forays into the other areas. Our logical form-based MT research has been used to translate the Microsoft product support knowledge base, which consists of over 100,000 articles, into Spanish, French, German and Japanese. An overview of this project can be found here.

My current focus is Machine Translation from languages for which we have a parser (such as English) into an arbitrary resource-poor target language, leveraging the parsed source-language dependency tree for improved translation quality as compared to string-based MT systems. Our recent ACL 2005 paper has lots of interesting experimental results.

Prior to joining MSR, I worked for 8 years on several Microsoft products, including Windows CE, Windows 95, MSN, Microsoft Site Server, Microsoft Commercial Internet Server, Windows 3.11 and the Microsoft At Work Fax project.

Publications

• Quirk, Chris, Arul Menezes and Colin Cherry. 2005. Dependency Treelet Translation: Syntactically Informed Phrasal SMT. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics,Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
   
• Quirk, Chris, Arul Menezes and Colin Cherry. 2004. Dependency Tree Translation: Syntactically Informed Phrasal SMT. Microsoft Research Technical Report: MSR-TR-2004-113.
   
• Menezes, Arul. 2002. Better contextual translation using machine learning. In Proceedings of the 5th conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. Tiburon, California
   
• Menezes, Arul and Stephen D. Richardson. 2001. A best-first alignment algorithm for automatic extraction of transfer mappings from bilingual corpora. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Data-driven Machine Translation at 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Toulouse, France, pp. 39-46.
   
• Menezes, A. and S. Richardson, S. 2001. A best-first alignment algorithm for automatic extraction of transfer mappings from bilingual corpora. In Proceedings of MT Summit VIII, Santiago De Compostela, Spain
   
• Richardson, S., W. Dolan, A. Menezes, and M. Corston-Oliver. 2001. Overcoming the customization bottleneck using example-based MT. In Proceedings, Workshop on Data-driven Machine Translation, 39th Annual Meeting and 10th Conference of the European Chapter, Association for Computational Linguistics Toulouse, France, pp. 9-16.
   
• Richardson, S., W. Dolan, A. Menezes, and J. Pinkham. 2001. Achieving commercial-quality translation with example-based methods. In Proceedings of MT Summit VIII, Santiago De Compostela, Spain, pp. 293-298.