Abstract

What empirical evidence is there that adding syntactic constraints to MT decoding particular, PMT decoding will lead to improvements in translation quality? Your proposal claims that your method for adding syntactic constraints will result not only in a more complete search of the space of string permutations involved in PMT but also in an improved ability to discriminate between good and bad translations. In Section 3 you claim that the ability to account for syntactically governed re-ordering patterns is an advantage and in Section 4 you claim, on the basis of a constructed example, that your proposed method will improve quality by removing ungrammatical but high scoring distractor analyses, and that the completeness of the search will be improved by reducing the need for aggressive heuristics about re-ordering. Do you anticipate that separate constraints on re-ordering will still be required? If not, say why not. If so, brie y sketch how these constraints will be implemented and the means by which they will interact with the new syntactic constraints. Statistical MT (SMT) systems are based on the source-channel model of communication (Weaver, 1949; Brown et al., 1993, 1990) whereby an output string is modelled as being

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