Cache-based document-level statistical machine translation

Statistical machine translation systems are usually trained on a large amount of bilingual sentence pairs and translate one sentence at a time, ignoring document-level information. In this paper, we propose a cache-based approach to document-level translation. Since caches mainly depend on relevant data to supervise subsequent decisions, it is critical to fill the caches with highly-relevant data of a reasonable size. In this paper, we present three kinds of caches to store relevant document-level information: 1) a dynamic cache, which stores bilingual phrase pairs from the best translation hypotheses of previous sentences in the test document; 2) a static cache, which stores relevant bilingual phrase pairs extracted from similar bilingual document pairs (i.e. source documents similar to the test document and their corresponding target documents) in the training parallel corpus; 3) a topic cache, which stores the target-side topic words related with the test document in the source-side. In particular, three new features are designed to explore various kinds of document-level information in above three kinds of caches. Evaluation shows the effectiveness of our cache-based approach to document-level translation with the performance improvement of 0.81 in BLUE score over Moses. Especially, detailed analysis and discussion are presented to give new insights to document-level translation.