Hierarchical Phrase-based Machine Translation with Word-based Reordering Model

Hierarchical phrase-based machine translation can capture global reordering with synchronous context-free grammar, but has little ability to evaluate the correctness of word orderings during decoding. We propose a method to integrate word-based reordering model into hierarchical phrasebased machine translation to overcome this weakness. Our approach extends the synchronous context-free grammar rules of hierarchical phrase-based model to include reordered source strings, allowing efficient calculation of reordering model scores during decoding. Our experimental results on Japanese-to-English basic travel expression corpus showed that the BLEU scores obtained by our proposed system were better than those obtained by a standard hierarchical phrase-based machine translation system.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: COLING
• Authors: Katsuhiko Hayashi, Hajime Tsukada, Katsuhito Sudoh, Kevin Duh, Seiichi Yamamoto
• Keywords: COLING 2010, Computational Linguistics, Hierarchical Phrase-based Machine, Phrase-based Machine Translation, Synchronous Context-free Grammar