Agreement constraints for statistical machine translation into German

  • Authors:
  • Philip Williams;Philipp Koehn

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Edinburgh, UK;University of Edinburgh, UK

  • Venue:
  • WMT '11 Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Languages with rich inflectional morphology pose a difficult challenge for statistical machine translation. To address the problem of morphologically inconsistent output, we add unification-based constraints to the target-side of a string-to-tree model. By integrating constraint evaluation into the decoding process, implausible hypotheses can be penalised or filtered out during search. We use a simple heuristic process to extract agreement constraints for German and test our approach on an English-German system trained on WMT data, achieving a small improvement in translation accuracy as measured by BLEU.