Vector Space Model for Adaptation in Statistical Machine Translation

Boxing Chen, Roland Kuhn and George Foster

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

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Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach to domain adaptation in statistical machine translation (SMT)based on a vector space model (VSM). The general idea is first to create a vector profile for the in-domain development (``dev'') set. This profile might, for instance, be a vector with a dimensionality equal to the number of training subcorpora; each entry in the vector reflects the contribution of a particular subcorpus to all the phrase pairs that can be extracted from the dev set. Then, for each phrase pair extracted from the training data, we create a vector with features defined in the same way, and calculate its similarity score with the vector representing the dev set. Thus, we obtain a decoding feature whose value represents the phrase pair's closeness to the dev. This is a simple, computationally cheap form of instance weighting for phrase pairs. Experiments on large scale NIST evaluation data show improvements over strong baselines: +1.8 BLEU on Arabic to English and +1.4 BLEU on Chinese to English over a non-adapted baseline, and significant improvements in most circumstances over baselines with linear mixture model adaptation. An informal analysis suggests that VSM adaptation may help in making a good choice among words with the same meaning, on the basis of style and genre.

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