In this paper we address the problem of translating between languages with word order disparity. The idea of augmenting statistical machine translation (SMT) by using a syntax-based reordering step prior to translation, proposed in recent years, has been quite successful in improving translation quality. We present a new technique for extracting syntax-based reordering rules, which are derived through a syntactically augmented alignment of source and target texts. The parallel corpus with reordered source side is then passed to an N-gram-based machine translation system and the obtained results are contrasted with a monotone system performance. In experiments, we show significant improvement for the Chinese-to-English translation task.
Maxim Khalilov, José A. R. Fonollosa