We propose Bilingual Tree Kernels (BTKs) to capture the structural similarities across a pair of syntactic translational equivalences and apply BTKs to sub-tree alignment along with some plain features. Our study reveals that the structural features embedded in a bilingual parse tree pair are very effective for sub-tree alignment and the bilingual tree kernels can well capture such features. The experimental results show that our approach achieves a significant improvement on both gold standard tree bank and automatically parsed tree pairs against a heuristic similarity based method. We further apply the sub-tree alignment in machine translation with two methods. It is suggested that the subtree alignment benefits both phrase and syntax based systems by relaxing the constraint of the word alignment. 1

We employ Maximum Entropy model to conduct sub-tree alignment between bilingual phrasal structure trees. Various lexical and structural knowledge is explored to measure the syntactic similarity across Chinese-English bilingual tree pairs. In the experiment, we evaluate the sub-tree alignment using both gold standard tree bank and the automatically parsed corpus with manually annotated sub-tree alignment. Compared with a heuristic similarity based method, the proposed method significantly improves the performance with only limited sub-tree aligned data. To examine its effectiveness for multilingual applications, we further attempt different approaches to apply the sub-tree alignment in both phrase and syntax based SMT systems. We then compare the performance with that of the widely used word alignment. Experimental results on benchmark data show that sub-tree alignment benefits both systems by relaxing the constraint of the word alignment.

The local multi bottom-up tree transducer is introduced and related to the (non-contiguous) synchronous tree sequence substitution grammar. It is then shown how to obtain a weighted local multi bottom-up tree transducer from a bilingual and biparsed corpus. Finally, the problem of non-preservation of regularity is addressed. Three properties that ensure preservation are introduced, and it is discussed how to adjust the rule extraction process such that they are automatically fulfilled. 1

In this second part of the survey, we present the application of weighted extended topdown tree transducers in machine translation, which is the automatic translation of natural language texts. We present several formal properties that are relevant in machine translation and evaluate the weighted extended top-down tree transducer along those criteria. In addition, we demonstrate how to extract rules for an extended top-down tree transducer from existing linguistic data and how to obtain suitable rule weights automatically from similar information. Overall, the aim of the survey is twofold. It should provide a synopsis that illustrates how theory (tree transducers) and practice (machine translation) interact on this particular example. Secondly, it presents a uniform and simplified treatment of the rule extraction and training algorithms that is accessible to the nonexpert. Additional details can be found in the original results that are referenced throughout the text.

We propose Tree Sequence Kernel (TSK), which implicitly exhausts the structure features of a sequence of subtrees embedded in the phrasal parse tree. By incorporating the capability of sequence kernel, TSK enriches tree kernel with tree sequence features so that it may provide additional useful patterns for machine learning applications. Two approaches of penalizing the substructures are proposed and both can be accomplished by efficient algorithms via dynamic programming. Evaluations are performed on two natural language tasks, i.e. Question Classification and Relation Extraction. Experimental results suggest that TSK outperforms tree kernel for both tasks, which also reveals that the structure features made up of multiple subtrees are effective and play a complementary role to the single tree structure.