Exploring syntactic structural features for sub-tree alignment using bilingual tree kernels

  • Authors:
  • Jun Sun;Min Zhang;Chew Lim Tan

  • Affiliations:
  • Institute for Infocomm Research and School of Computing;Institute for Infocomm Research;National University of Singapore

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

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Abstract

We propose Bilingual Tree Kernels (BTKs) to capture the structural similarities across a pair of syntactic translational equivalences and apply BTKs to sub-tree alignment along with some plain features. Our study reveals that the structural features embedded in a bilingual parse tree pair are very effective for sub-tree alignment and the bilingual tree kernels can well capture such features. The experimental results show that our approach achieves a significant improvement on both gold standard tree bank and automatically parsed tree pairs against a heuristic similarity based method. We further apply the sub-tree alignment in machine translation with two methods. It is suggested that the subtree alignment benefits both phrase and syntax based systems by relaxing the constraint of the word alignment.