Sampling alignment structure under a Bayesian translation model

  • Authors:
  • John DeNero;Alexandre Bouchard-Côté;Dan Klein

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

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

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We describe the first tractable Gibbs sampling procedure for estimating phrase pair frequencies under a probabilistic model of phrase alignment. We propose and evaluate two nonparametric priors that successfully avoid the degenerate behavior noted in previous work, where overly large phrases memorize the training data. Phrase table weights learned under our model yield an increase in BLEU score over the word-alignment based heuristic estimates used regularly in phrase-based translation systems.