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

The end-to-end performance of natural language processing systems for compound tasks, such as question answering and textual entailment, is often hampered by use of a greedy 1-best pipeline architecture, which causes errors to propagate and compound at each stage. We present a novel architecture, which models these pipelines as Bayesian networks, with each low level task corresponding to a variable in the network, and then we perform approximate inference to find the best labeling. Our approach is extremely simple to apply but gains the benefits of sampling the entire distribution over labels at each stage in the pipeline. We apply our method to two tasks – semantic role labeling and recognizing textual entailment – and achieve useful performance gains from the superior pipeline architecture. 1

We present a hierarchical phrase-based translation model which annotates and generalizes existing phrase translations with syntactic categories derived from parsing the target side of a parallel corpus. We associate target parse trees for each training sentence pair with a search lattice constructed from the existing phrase translations on the corresponding source sentence, and consider techniques to produce a syntactically motivated bilingual synchronous grammar. We describe refinements to a chart based decoder and k-best extraction techniques to effectively parse the resulting grammar, which contains up to 4000 syntax-derivated nonterminals, producing translations that achieve significant improvements over Pharaoh, a stateof-the-art phrase based system, on the Europarl French-to-English task (Koehn and Monz, 2005). 1

We present cdec, an open source framework for decoding, aligning with, and training a number of statistical machine translation models, including word-based models, phrase-based models, and models based on synchronous context-free grammars. Using a single unified internal representation for translation forests, the decoder strictly separates model-specific translation logic from general rescoring, pruning, and inference algorithms. From this unified representation, the decoder can extract not only the 1- or k-best translations, but also alignments to a reference, or the quantities necessary to drive discriminative training using gradient-based or gradient-free optimization techniques. Its efficient C++ implementation means that memory use and runtime performance are significantly better than comparable decoders. 1

Conventional n-best reranking techniques often suffer from the limited scope of the n-best list, which rules out many potentially good alternatives. We instead propose forest reranking, a method that reranks a packed forest of exponentially many parses. Since exact inference is intractable with non-local features, we present an approximate algorithm inspired by forest rescoring that makes discriminative training practical over the whole Treebank. Our final result, an F-score of 91.7, outperforms both 50-best and 100-best reranking baselines, and is better than any previously reported systems trained on the Treebank. 1

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Systems based on synchronous grammars and tree transducers promise to improve the quality of statistical machine translation output, but are often very computationally intensive. The complexity is exponential in the size of individual grammar rules due to arbitrary re-orderings between the two languages. We develop a theory of binarization for synchronous context-free grammars and present a linear-time algorithm for binarizing synchronous rules when possible. In our large-scale experiments, we found that almost all rules are binarizable and the resulting binarized rule set significantly improves the speed and accuracy of a state-of-the-art syntaxbased machine translation system. We also discuss the more general, and computationally more difficult, problem of finding good parsing strategies for non-binarizable rules, and present an approximate polynomial-time algorithm for this problem. 1.

We present an efficient, novel two-pass approach to mitigate the computational impact resulting from online intersection of an n-gram language model (LM) and a probabilistic synchronous context-free grammar (PSCFG) for statistical machine translation. In first pass CYK-style decoding, we consider first-best chart item approximations, generating a hypergraph of sentence spanning target language derivations. In the second stage, we instantiate specific alternative derivations from this hypergraph, using the LM to drive this search process, recovering from search errors made in the first pass. Model search errors in our approach are comparable to those made by the state-of-the-art “Cube Pruning ” approach in (Chiang, 2007) under comparable pruning conditions evaluated on both hierarchical and syntax-based grammars. 1

Incremental parsing techniques such as shift-reduce have gained popularity thanks to their efficiency, but there remains a major problem: the search is greedy and only explores a tiny fraction of the whole space (even with beam search) as opposed to dynamic programming. We show that, surprisingly, dynamic programming is in fact possible for many shift-reduce parsers, by merging “equivalent ” stacks based on feature values. Empirically, our algorithm yields up to a five-fold speedup over a state-of-the-art shift-reduce dependency parser with no loss in accuracy. Better search also leads to better learning, and our final parser outperforms all previously reported dependency parsers for English and Chinese, yet is much faster. 1

Current tree-to-tree models suffer from parsing errors as they usually use only 1-best parses for rule extraction and decoding. We instead propose a forest-based tree-to-tree model that uses packed forests. The model is based on a probabilistic synchronous tree substitution grammar (STSG), which can be learned from aligned forest pairs automatically. The decoder finds ways of decomposing trees in the source forest into elementary trees using the source projection of STSG while building target forest in parallel. Comparable to the state-of-the-art phrase-based system Moses, using packed forests in tree-to-tree translation results in a significant absolute improvement of 3.6 BLEU points over using 1-best trees. 1