A Comparison of Pivot Methods for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation

We compare two pivot strategies for phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT), namely phrase translation and sentence translation. The phrase translation strategy means that we directly construct a phrase translation table (phrase-table) of the source and target language pair from two phrase-tables; one constructed from the source language and English and one constructed from English and the target language. We then use that phrase-table in a phrase-based SMT system. The sentence translation strategy means that we first translate a source language sentence into n English sentences and then translate these n sentences into target language sentences separately. Then, we select the highest scoring sentence from these target sentences. We conducted controlled experiments using the Europarl corpus to evaluate the performance of these pivot strategies as compared to directly trained SMT systems. The phrase translation strategy significantly outperformed the sentence translation s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: NAACL
• Authors: Masao Utiyama, Hitoshi Isahara
• Keywords: Computational Linguistics, NAACL 2007, Phrase Translation, Sentence Translation, Translation Strategy