done while at Microsoft Research We describe a novel approach to statistical machine translation that combines syntactic information in the source language with recent advances in phrasal translation. We depend on a source-language dependency parser and a word-aligned parallel corpus. The only target language resource assumed is a word breaker. These are used to produce treelet (“phrase”) translation pairs as well as several models, including a channel model, an order model, and a target language model. Together these models and the treelet translation pairs provide a powerful and promising approach to MT that incorporates the power of phrasal SMT with the linguistic generality available in a parser. We evaluate two decoding approaches, one inspired by dynamic programming and the

We present the first known direct measurement of word alignment coverage on an Arabic-English parallel corpus using inversion transduction grammar constraints. While direct measurements have been reported for several European and Asian languages, to date no results have been available for Arabic or any Semitic language despite much recent activity on Arabic-English spoken language and text translation. Many recent syntax based statistical MT models operate within the domain of ITG expressiveness, often for efficiency reasons, so it has become important to determine the extent to which the ITG constraint assumption holds. Our results on Arabic provide further evidence that ITG expressiveness appears largely sufficient for core MT models.

The PASCAL Challenge’s textual entailment recognition (RTE) task presents intriguing opportunities to test various implications of the strong language universal constraint posited by Wu’s (1995, 1997) Inversion Transduction Grammar (ITG) hypothesis. The ITG Hypothesis provides a strong inductive bias, and has been repeatedly shown empirically to yield both efficiency and accuracy gains for numerous language acquisition tasks. Since the RTE challenge abstracts over many tasks, it invites meaningful analysis of the ITG Hypothesis across tasks including information retrieval, comparable documents, reading comprehension, question answering, information extraction, machine translation, and paraphrase acquisition. We investigate two new models for the RTE problem that employ simple generic Bracketing ITGs. Experimental results show that, even in the absence of any thesaurus to accommodate lexical variation between the Text and the Hypothesis strings, surprisingly strong results for a number of the task subsets are obtainable from the Bracketing ITG’s structure matching bias alone. 1

We present first results using paraphrase as well as textual entailment data to test the language universal constraint posited by Wu's (1995, 1997) Inversion Transduction Grammar (ITG) hypothesis. In machine translation and alignment, the ITG Hypothesis provides a strong inductive bias, and has been shown empirically across numerous language pairs and corpora to yield both efficiency and accuracy gains for various language acquisition tasks. Monolingual paraphrase and textual entailment recognition datasets, however, potentially facilitate closer tests of certain aspects of the hypothesis than bilingual parallel corpora, which simultaneously exhibit many irrelevant dimensions of cross-lingual variation. We investigate this using simple generic Bracketing ITGs containing no language-specific linguistic knowledge. Experimental results on the MSR Paraphrase Corpus show that, even in the absence of any thesaurus to accommodate lexical variation between the paraphrases, an uninterpolated average precision of at least 76% is obtainable from the Bracketing ITG's structure matching bias alone. This is consistent with experimental results on the Pascal Recognising Textual Entailment Challenge Corpus, which show surpisingly strong results for a number of the task subsets.