Soft Dependency Constraints for Reordering in Hierarchical Phrase-Based Translation

Yang Gao, Philipp Koehn, Alexandra Birch

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Long-distance reordering remains one of the biggest challenges facing machine translation. We derive soft constraints from the source dependency parsing to directly address the reordering problem for the hierarchical phrasebased model. Our approach significantly improves Chinese–English machine translation on a large-scale task by 0.84 BLEU points on average. Moreover, when we switch the
tuning function from BLEU to the LRscore which promotes reordering, we observe total improvements of 1.21 BLEU, 1.30 LRscore and 3.36 TER over the baseline. On average our approach improves reordering precision and recall by 6.9 and 0.3 absolute points, respectively, and is found to be especially effective for long-distance reodering.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2011, 27-31 July 2011, John McIntyre Conference Centre, Edinburgh, UK, A meeting of SIGDAT, a Special Interest Group of the ACL
Pages857-868
Number of pages12
Publication statusPublished - 2011

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Soft Dependency Constraints for Reordering in Hierarchical Phrase-Based Translation'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this