Distortion Model Considering Rich Context for Statistical Machine Translation

Isao Goto, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita, Akihiro Tamura and Sadao Kurohashi

The 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013)
Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9, 2013

---

Abstract

This paper proposes new distortion models for phrase-based SMT. In decoding, a distortion model estimates the source word position to be translated next (NP) given the last translated source word position (CP). We propose a distortion model that can consider the word at the CP, a word at an NP candidate, and the context of the CP and the NP candidate simultaneously. Moreover, we propose a further improved model that considers richer context by discriminating label sequences that specify spans from the CP to NP candidates. It enables our model to learn the effect of relative word order among NP candidates as well as to learn the effect of distances from the training data. In our experiments, our model improved 1.8 BLEU points for Japanese-English and 2.2 BLEU points for Chinese-English translation compared to the lexical reordering models.

---

START Conference Manager (V2.61.0 - Rev. 2792M)