Models of word alignment built as sequences of links have limited expressive power, but are easy to decode. Word aligners that model the alignment matrix can express arbitrary alignments, but are difficult to decode. We propose an alignment matrix model as a correction algorithm to an underlying sequencebased aligner. Then a greedy decoding algorithm enables the full expressive power of the alignment matrix formulation. Improved alignment performance is shown for all nine language pairs tested. The improved alignments also improved translation quality from Chinese to English and English to Italian. 1

Abstract—A fundamental data integration task faced by online commercial portals and commerce search engines is the integration of products coming from multiple providers to their product catalogs. In this scenario, the commercial portal has its own taxonomy (the “master taxonomy”), while each data provider organizes its products into a different taxonomy (the “provider taxonomy”). In this paper, we consider the problem of categorizing products from the data providers into the master taxonomy, while making use of the provider taxonomy information. Our approach is based on a taxonomy-aware processing step that adjusts the results of a text-based classifier to ensure that products that are close together in the provider taxonomy remain close in the master taxonomy. We formulate this intuition as a structured prediction optimization problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that leverages the structure of taxonomies in order to enhance catalog integration. We propose algorithms that are scalable and thus applicable to the large datasets that are typical on the Web. We evaluate our algorithms on real-world data and we show that taxonomy-aware classification provides a significant improvement over existing approaches. Index Terms—catalog integration, classification, data mining, taxonomies.

A forced derivation tree (FDT) of a sentence pair {f, e} denotes a derivation tree that can translate f into its accurate target translation e. In this paper, we present an approach that leverages structured knowledge contained in FDTs to train component models for statistical machine translation (SMT) systems. We first describe how to generate different FDTs for each sentence pair in training corpus, and then present how to infer the optimal FDTs based on their derivation and alignment qualities. As the first step in this line of research, we verify the effectiveness of our approach in a BTGbased phrasal system, and propose four FDTbased component models. Experiments are carried out on large scale English-to-Japanese and Chinese-to-English translation tasks, and significant improvements are reported on both translation quality and alignment quality. 1