What Is A Dictionary - Custom Translator - Azure Cognitive Services - Microsoft Docs

5/7/2021 What is a dictionary?
- Custom Translator - Azure Cognitive Services | Microsoft Docs
What is a dictionary?
08/17/20204 minutes to read +5
In this article
Phrase dictionary
Sentence dictionary
Dictionary-only trainings
Recommendations
Next steps
A dictionary is an aligned pair of documents that specifies a list of phrases or sentences and their
corresponding translations. Use a dictionary in your training, when you want Microsoft Translator to
always translate any instances of the source phrase or sentence, using the translation you've provided
in the dictionary. Dictionaries are sometimes called glossaries or term bases. You can think of the
dictionary as a brute force “copy and replace” for all the terms you list. Furthermore, Microsoft Custom
Translator service builds and makes use of its own general purpose dictionaries to improve the quality
of its translation. However, a customer provided dictionary takes precedent and will be searched first
to lookup words or sentences.
Dictionaries only work for projects in language pairs that have a fully supported Microsoft general
neural network model behind them. View the complete list of languages.
Phrase dictionary
Phrase dictionary is case-sensitive. It is an exact find and replace operation. When you include a phrase
dictionary in training your model, any word or phrase listed is translated in the way you specified. The
rest of the sentence is translated as usual. You can use a phrase dictionary to specify phrases that
shouldn't be translated by providing the same untranslated phrase in the source and target file in the
dictionary.
Sentence dictionary
The sentence dictionary is case-insensitive. The sentence dictionary allows you to specify an exact
target translation for a source sentence. For a sentence dictionary match to occur, the entire submitted
sentence must match the source dictionary entry. If the source dictionary entry ends with punctuation,
it is ignored during the match. If only a portion of the sentence matches, the entry won't match. When
a match is detected, the target entry of the sentence dictionary will be returned.
Dictionary-only trainings
You can train a model using only dictionary data. To do this, select only the dictionary document (or
multiple dictionary documents) that you wish to include and tap Create model. Since this is a
dictionary-only training, there is no minimum number of training sentences required. Your model will
typically complete training much faster than a standard training. The resulting models will use the
Microsoft baseline models for translation with the addition of the dictionaries you have added. You will
not get a test report.
Note
Custom Translator does not sentence align dictionary files, so it is important that there are an
equal number of source and target phrases/sentences in your dictionary documents and that they
are precisely aligned.
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5/7/2021 What is a dictionary? - Custom Translator - Azure Cognitive Services | Microsoft Docs
Recommendations
Dictionaries are not a substitute for training a model using training data. It is recommended to
avoid them and let the system learn from your training data. However, when sentences or
compound nouns must be rendered as-is, use a dictionary.
The phrase dictionary should be used sparingly. So, be aware that when a phrase within a
sentence is replaced, the context within that sentence is lost or limited for translating the rest of
the sentence. The result is that while the phrase or word within the sentence will translate
according to the provided dictionary, the overall translation quality of the sentence will often
suffer.
The phrase dictionary works well for compound nouns like product names (“Microsoft SQL
Server”), proper names (“City of Hamburg”), or features of the product (“pivot table”). It does not
work equally well for verbs or adjectives because these are typically highly inflected in the source
or in the target language. Best practices is to avoid phrase dictionary entries for anything but
compound nouns.
When using a phrase dictionary, capitalization and punctuation are important. Dictionary entries
will only match words and phrases in the input sentence that use exactly the same capitalization
and punctuation as specified in the source dictionary file. Also the translations will reflect the
capitalization and punctuation provided in the target dictionary file. For example, if you trained
an English to Spanish system that uses a phrase dictionary that specifies “US” in the source file,
and “EE.UU.” in the target file. When you request translation of a sentence that includes the word
“us” (not capitalized), this would NOT match the dictionary. However if you request translation of
a sentence that contains the word “US” (capitalized) then it would match the dictionary and the
translation would contain “EE.UU.” Note that the capitalization and punctuation in the translation
may be different than specified in the dictionary target file, and may be different from the
capitalization and punctuation in the source. It follows the rules of the target language.
When using a sentence dictionary, the end of sentence punctuation is ignored. For example, if
your source dictionary contains "this sentence ends with punctuation!", then any translation
requests containing "this sentence ends with punctuation" would match.
If a word appears more than once in a dictionary file, the system will always use the last entry
provided. Hence, your dictionary should not contain multiple translations of the same word.
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