Hierarchical search for word alignment

  • Authors:
  • Jason Riesa;Daniel Marcu

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Southern California;University of Southern California

  • Venue:
  • ACL '10 Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We present a simple yet powerful hierarchical search algorithm for automatic word alignment. Our algorithm induces a forest of alignments from which we can efficiently extract a ranked k-best list. We score a given alignment within the forest with a flexible, linear discriminative model incorporating hundreds of features, and trained on a relatively small amount of annotated data. We report results on Arabic-English word alignment and translation tasks. Our model outperforms a GIZA++ Model-4 baseline by 6.3 points in F-measure, yielding a 1.1 Bleu score increase over a state-of-the-art syntax-based machine translation system.