We present a statistical machine translation model that uses hierarchical phrases—phrases that contain subphrases. The model is formally a synchronous context-free grammar but is learned from a parallel text without any syntactic annotations. Thus it can be seen as combining fundamental ideas from both syntax-based translation and phrase-based translation. We describe our system’s training and decoding methods in detail, and evaluate it for translation speed and translation accuracy. Using BLEU as a metric of translation accuracy, we find that our system performs significantly better than the Alignment Template System, a state-of-the-art phrasebased system. 1.

In this paper, we propose a novel string-todependency algorithm for statistical machine translation. With this new framework, we employ a target dependency language model during decoding to exploit long distance word relations, which are unavailable with a traditional n-gram language model. Our experiments show that the string-to-dependency decoder achieves 1.48 point improvement in BLEU and 2.53 point improvement in TER compared to a standard hierarchical string-tostring system on the NIST 04 Chinese-English evaluation set. 1

A syntax-directed translator first parses the source-language input into a parsetree, and then recursively converts the tree into a string in the target-language. We model this conversion by an extended treeto-string transducer that have multi-level trees on the source-side, which gives our system more expressive power and flexibility. We also define a direct probability model and use a linear-time dynamic programming algorithm to search for the best derivation. The model is then extended to the general log-linear framework in order to rescore with other features like n-gram language models. We devise a simple-yet-effective algorithm to generate non-duplicate k-best translations for n-gram rescoring. Initial experimental results on English-to-Chinese translation are presented. 1

Among syntax-based translation models, the tree-based approach, which takes as input a parse tree of the source sentence, is a promising direction being faster and simpler than its string-based counterpart. However, current tree-based systems suffer from a major drawback: they only use the 1-best parse to direct the translation, which potentially introduces translation mistakes due to parsing errors. We propose a forest-based approach that translates a packed forest of exponentially many parses, which encodes many more alternatives than standard n-best lists. Large-scale experiments show an absolute improvement of 1.7 BLEU points over the 1-best baseline. This result is also 0.8 points higher than decoding with 30-best parses, and takes even less time. 1

We present posterior regularization, a probabilistic framework for structured, weakly supervised learning. Our framework efficiently incorporates indirect supervision via constraints on posterior distributions of probabilistic models with latent variables. Posterior regularization separates model complexity from the complexity of structural constraints it is desired to satisfy. By directly imposing decomposable regularization on the posterior moments of latent variables during learning, we retain the computational efficiency of the unconstrained model while ensuring desired constraints hold in expectation. We present an efficient algorithm for learning with posterior regularization and illustrate its versatility on a diverse set of structural constraints such as bijectivity, symmetry and group sparsity in several large scale experiments, including multi-view learning, cross-lingual dependency grammar induction, unsupervised part-of-speech induction, and bitext word alignment. 1

Syntactic reordering approaches are an effective method for handling word-order differences between source and target languages in statistical machine translation (SMT) systems. This paper introduces a reordering approach for translation from Chinese to English. We describe a set of syntactic reordering rules that exploit systematic differences between Chinese and English word order. The resulting system is used as a preprocessor for both training and test sentences, transforming Chinese sentences to be much closer to English in terms of their word order. We evaluated the reordering approach within the MOSES phrase-based SMT system (Koehn et al., 2007). The reordering approach improved the BLEU score for the MOSES system from 28.52 to 30.86 on the NIST 2006 evaluation data. We also conducted a series of experiments to analyze the accuracy and impact of different types of reordering rules. 1

Statistical machine translation (SMT) treats the translation of natural language as a machine learning problem. By examining many samples of human-produced translation, SMT algorithms automatically learn how to translate. SMT has made tremendous strides in less than two decades, and many popular techniques have only emerged within the last few years. This survey presents a tutorial overview of state-of-the-art SMT at the beginning of 2007. We begin with the context of the current research, and then move to a formal problem description and an overview of the four main subproblems: translational equivalence modeling, mathematical modeling, parameter estimation, and decoding. Along the way, we present a taxonomy of some different approaches within these areas. We conclude with an overview of evaluation and notes on future directions.

ccb cs jhu edu We improve the quality of paraphrases extracted from parallel corpora by requiring that phrases and their paraphrases be the same syntactic type. This is achieved by parsing the English side of a parallel corpus and altering the phrase extraction algorithm to extract phrase labels alongside bilingual phrase pairs. In order to retain broad coverage of non-constituent phrases, complex syntactic labels are introduced. A manual evaluation indicates a 19% absolute improvement in paraphrase quality over the baseline method. 1

Translation rule extraction is a fundamental problem in machine translation, especially for linguistically syntax-based systems that need parse trees from either or both sides of the bitext. The current dominant practice only uses 1-best trees, which adversely affects the rule set quality due to parsing errors. So we propose a novel approach which extracts rules from a packed forest that compactly encodes exponentially many parses. Experiments show that this method improves translation quality by over 1 BLEU point on a state-of-the-art tree-to-string system, and is 0.5 points better than (and twice as fast as) extracting on 30best parses. When combined with our previous work on forest-based decoding, it achieves a 2.5 BLEU points improvement over the baseline, and even outperforms the hierarchical system of Hiero by 0.7 points. 1

This paper presents a syntax-driven approach to question answering, specifically the answer-sentence selection problem for short-answer questions. Rather than using syntactic features to augment existing statistical classifiers (as in previous work), we build on the idea that questions and their (correct) answers relate to each other via loose but predictable syntactic transformations. We propose a probabilistic quasi-synchronous grammar, inspired by one proposed for machine translation (D. Smith and Eisner, 2006), and parameterized by mixtures of a robust nonlexical syntax/alignment model with a(n optional) lexical-semantics-driven log-linear model. Our model learns soft alignments as a hidden variable in discriminative training. Experimental results using the TREC dataset are shown to significantly outperform strong state-of-the-art baselines. 1