Abstract

We present a statistical machine translation model that uses hierarchical phrases—phrases that contain subphrases. The model is formally a synchronous context-free grammar but is learned from a parallel text without any syntactic annotations. Thus it can be seen as combining fundamental ideas from both syntax-based translation and phrase-based translation. We describe our system’s training and decoding methods in detail, and evaluate it for translation speed and translation accuracy. Using BLEU as a metric of translation accuracy, we find that our system performs significantly better than the Alignment Template System, a state-of-the-art phrasebased system. 1.

Citations

7321	Introduction to Algorithms - Cormen, Leiserson, et al. - 2001
992	BLEU: A Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation - Papineni, Roukos, et al. - 2002
417	Statistical phrase-based translation - Koehn, Och, et al. - 2003
343	Stochastic inversion transduction grammars and bilingual parsing of parallel corpora - Wu - 1997
341	Improved statistical alignment models - Och, Ney - 2000
287	Statistical Decision-Tree Models for Parsing - Magerman - 1995
256	Discriminative training and maximum entropy models for statistical machine translation - Och, Ney
245	The alignment template approach to statistical machine translation - Och, Ney - 2004
202	K.: A syntax-based statistical translation model - Yamada, Knight - 2001
179	Improved backing-off for m-gram language modeling - Kneser, Ney - 1995
150	Principles and implementation of deductive parsing - Shieber, Schabes, et al. - 1995
135	A phrase-based, joint probability model for statistical machine translation - Marcu, Wong - 2002
103	Better k-best parsing - Huang, Chiang - 2005
102	Dependency treelet translation: Syntactically informed phrasal smt - Quirk, Menezes, et al. - 2005
93	On formal properties of simple phrase structure grammars - Bar-Hillel, Perles, et al. - 1964
68	A polynomial-time algorithm for statistical machine translation - Wu - 1996
65	Clause restructuring for statistical machine translation - Collins, Koehn, et al. - 2005
62	Syntax-Directed Transduction - Lewis, Stearns - 1968
60	A Computational Model of Language Performance: Data Oriented Parsing. COLING-92 - Bod - 1992
57	Learning dependency translation models as collections of finite-state head transducers - Alshawi, Bangalore, et al. - 2000
51	Machine translation using probabilistic synchronous dependency insertion grammars - Ding, Palmer - 2005
50	Semiring parsing - Goodman - 1998
36	The Mathematics of Statistical Machine Translation: Parameter Estimation - Mercer - 1994
31	Representation-based just-in-time specialization and the Psyco prototype for Python - Rigo - 2004
24	A weighted finite state transducer translation template model for statistical machine translation. Natural Language Engineering - Kumar, Deng, et al. - 2005
23	Translating with Non-contiguous Phrases - Simard, Cancedda, et al. - 2005
16	M.: The hiero machine translation system: extensions, evaluation, and analysis - Chiang, Lopez, et al. - 2005
9	MT for minority languages using elicitation-based learning of syntactic transfer rules - Probst, Levin, et al. - 2002
7	Example-Based Incremental Synchronous Interpretation - Block - 2000
1	Chiang Hierarchical Phrase-Based Translation - Galley, Hopkins, et al. - 2004