Generalizing local and non-local word-reordering patterns for syntax-based machine translation

  • Authors:
  • Bing Zhao;Yaser Al-onaizan

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM T.J. Watson Research, Yorktown Heights, NY;IBM T.J. Watson Research, Yorktown Heights, NY

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

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Abstract

Syntactic word reordering is essential for translations across different grammar structures between syntactically distant language-pairs. In this paper, we propose to embed local and non-local word reordering decisions in a synchronous context free grammar, and leverages the grammar in a chart-based decoder. Local word-reordering is effectively encoded in Hiero-like rules; whereas non-local word-reordering, which allows for long-range movements of syntactic chunks, is represented in tree-based reordering rules, which contain variables correspond to source-side syntactic constituents. We demonstrate how these rules are learned from parallel corpora. Our proposed shallow Tree-to-String rules show significant improvements in translation quality across different test sets.