The Alignment Template Approach to Statistical Machine Translation

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The Alignment Template Approach to Statistical Machine Translation (2004)

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by Franz Josef Och , Hermann Ney

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@MISC{Och04thealignment,
    author = {Franz Josef Och and Hermann Ney},
    title = {The Alignment Template Approach to Statistical Machine Translation},
    year = {2004}
}

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Abstract

A phrase-based statistical machine translation approach — the alignment template approach — is described. This translation approach allows for general many-to-many relations between words. Thereby, the context of words is taken into account in the translation model, and local changes in word order from source to target language can be learned explicitly. The model is described using a log-linear modeling approach, which is a generalization of the often used source–channel approach. Thereby, the model is easier to extend than classical statistical machine translation systems. We describe in detail the process for learning phrasal translations, the feature functions used, and the search algorithm. The evaluation of this approach is performed on three different tasks. For the German–English speech Verbmobil task, we analyze the effect of various system components. On the French–English Canadian Hansards task, the alignment template system obtains significantly better results than a single-word-based translation model. In the Chinese–English 2002 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) machine translation evaluation it yields statistically significantly better NIST scores than all competing research and commercial translation systems.

Keyphrases

alignment template approach statistical machine translation translation model phrasal translation nist score feature function search algorithm phrase-based statistical machine translation translation approach different task french english canadian hansard task single-word-based translation model various system component national institute log-linear modeling approach local change general many-to-many relation machine translation evaluation german english speech verbmobil task classical statistical machine translation system alignment template system word order source channel approach commercial translation system

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