Coarse-to-fine syntactic machine translation using language projections

  • Authors:
  • Slav Petrov;Aria Haghighi;Dan Klein

  • Affiliations:
  • University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • EMNLP '08 Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The intersection of tree transducer-based translation models with n-gram language models results in huge dynamic programs for machine translation decoding. We propose a multipass, coarse-to-fine approach in which the language model complexity is incrementally introduced. In contrast to previous order-based bigram-to-trigram approaches, we focus on encoding-based methods, which use a clustered encoding of the target language. Across various encoding schemes, and for multiple language pairs, we show speed-ups of up to 50 times over single-pass decoding while improving BLEU score. Moreover, our entire decoding cascade for trigram language models is faster than the corresponding bigram pass alone of a bigram-to-trigram decoder.