An unsupervised discriminative training procedure is proposed for estimating a language model (LM) for machine translation (MT). An English-to-English synchronous context-free grammar is derived from a baseline MT system to capture translation alternatives: pairs of words, phrases or other sentence fragments that potentially compete to be the translation of the same source-language fragment. Using this grammar, a set of impostor sentences is then created for each English sentence to simulate confusions that would arise if the system were to process

This paper shows that discriminative reranking with an averaged perceptron model yields substantial improvements in realization quality with CCG. The paper confirms the utility of including language model log probabilities as features in the model, which prior work on discriminative training with log linear models for HPSG realization had called into question. The perceptron model allows the combination of multiple n-gram models to be optimized and then augmented with both syntactic features and discriminative n-gram features. The full model yields a stateof-the-art BLEU score of 0.8506 on Section 23 of the CCGbank, to our knowledge the best score reported to date using a reversible, corpus-engineered grammar. 1

We present a new translation model that include undecorated hierarchical-style phrase rules, decorated source-syntax rules, and partially decorated rules. Results show an increase in translation performance of up to 0.8 % BLEU for German–English translation when trained on the news-commentary corpus, using syntactic annotation from a source language parser. We also experimented with annotation from shallow taggers and found this increased performance by 0.5 % BLEU. 1

In this work we review and compare three additional syntactic enhancements for the hierarchical phrase-based translation model, which have been presented in the last few years. We compare their performance when applied separately and study whether the combination may yield additional improvements. Our findings show that the models are complementary, and their combination achieve an increase of 1 % in BLEU and a reduction of nearly 2 % in TER. The models presented in this work are made available as part of the Jane open source machine translation toolkit. 1

State-of-the-art statistical machine translation (MT) systems have made significant progress towards producing user-acceptable translation output. However, there is still no efficient way for MT systems to inform users which words are likely translated correctly and how confident it is about the whole sentence. We propose a novel framework to predict wordlevel and sentence-level MT errors with a large number of novel features. Experimental results show that the MT error prediction accuracy is increased from 69.1 to 72.2 in F-score. The Pearson correlation between the proposed confidence measure and the human-targeted translation edit rate (HTER) is 0.6. Improvements between 0.4 and 0.9 TER reduction are obtained with the n-best list reranking task using the proposed confidence measure. Also, we present a visualization prototype of MT errors at the word and sentence levels with the objective to improve post-editor productivity. 1

Discriminative training for machine translation has been well studied in the recent past. A limitation of the work to date is that it relies on the availability of high-quality in-domain bilingual text for supervised training. We present an unsupervised discriminative training framework to incorporate the usually plentiful target-language monolingual data by using a rough “reverse ” translation system. Intuitively, our method strives to ensure that probabilistic “round-trip ” translation from a targetlanguage sentence to the source-language and back will have low expected loss. Theoretically, this may be justified as (discriminatively) minimizing an imputed empirical risk. Empirically, we demonstrate that augmenting supervised training with unsupervised data improves translation performance over the supervised case for both IWSLT and NIST tasks. 1

This paper seeks to close the gap between training algorithms used in statistical machine translation and machine learning, specifically the framework of empirical risk minimization. We review well-known algorithms, arguing that they do not optimize the loss functions they are assumed to optimize when applied to machine translation. Instead, most have implicit connections to particular forms of ramp loss. We propose to minimize ramp loss directly and present a training algorithm that is easy to implement and that performs comparably to others. Most notably, our structured ramp loss minimization algorithm, RAMPION, is less sensitive to initialization and random seeds than standard approaches. 1

We describe the progress we have made in the past year on Joshua (Li et al., 2009a), an open source toolkit for parsing based machine translation. The new functionality includes: support for translation grammars with a rich set of syntactic nonterminals, the ability for external modules to posit constraints on how spans in the input sentence should be translated, lattice parsing for dealing with input uncertainty, a semiring framework that provides a unified way of doing various dynamic programming calculations, variational decoding for approximating the intractable MAP decoding, hypergraph-based discriminative training for better feature engineering, a parallelized MERT module, documentlevel and tail-based MERT, visualization of the derivation trees, and a cleaner pipeline for MT experiments. 1

Tree-to-string translation rules are widely used in linguistically syntax-based statistical machine translation systems. In this paper, we propose to use deep syntactic information for obtaining fine-grained translation rules. A head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) parser is used to obtain the deep syntactic information, which includes a fine-grained description of the syntactic property and a semantic representation of a sentence. We extract fine-grained rules from aligned HPSG tree/forest-string pairs and use them in our tree-to-string and string-to-tree systems. Extensive experiments on largescale bidirectional Japanese-English translations testified the effectiveness of our approach. 1

Hierarchical phrase-based (HPB) translation provides a powerful mechanism to capture both short and long distance phrase reorderings. However, the phrase reorderings lack of contextual information in conventional HPB systems. This paper proposes a contextdependent phrase reordering approach that uses the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) model to help the HPB decoder select appropriate reordering patterns. We classify translation rules into several reordering patterns, and build a MaxEnt model for each pattern based on various contextual features. We integrate the MaxEnt models into the HPB model. Experimental results show that our approach achieves significant improvements over a standard HPB system on large-scale translation tasks. On Chinese-to-English translation, the absolute improvements in BLEU (caseinsensitive) range from 1.2 to 2.1. 1