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Transformation from discontinuous to continuousword alignment improves translation quality

  • Zhongjun He
  • , Hua Wu
  • , Haifeng Wang
  • , Ting Liu
  • Baidu Inc

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

We present a novel approach to improve word alignment for statistical machine translation (SMT). Conventional word alignment methods allow discontinuous alignment, meaning that a source (or target) word links to several target (or source) words whose positions are discontinuous. However, we cannot extract phrase pairs from this kind of alignments as they break the alignment consistency constraint. In this paper, we use a weighted vote method to transform discontinuous word alignment to continuous alignment, which enables SMT systems extract more phrase pairs. We carry out experiments on large scale Chineseto- English and German-to-English translation tasks. Experimental results show statistically significant improvements of BLEU score in both cases over the baseline systems. Our method produces a gain of +1.68 BLEU on NIST OpenMT04 for the phrase-based system, and a gain of +1.28 BLEU on NIST OpenMT06 for the hierarchical phrase-based system.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2014 - 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages147-152
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781937284961
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2014 - Doha, Qatar
Duration: 25 Oct 201429 Oct 2014

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2014 - 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2014
Country/TerritoryQatar
CityDoha
Period25/10/1429/10/14

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