Phrase Training Based Adaptation for Statistical Machine Translation

Saab Mansour and Hermann Ney

We present a novel approach for translation model (TM) adaptation using phrase training. The proposed adaptation procedure is initialized with a standard general-domain TM, which is then used to perform phrase training on a smaller in-domain set. This way, we bias the probabilities of the general TM towards the in-domain distribution. Experimental results on two different lectures translation tasks show significant improvements of the adapted systems over the general ones. Additionally, we compare our results to mixture modeling, where we report gains when using the suggested phrase training adaptation method.