Syntax-Based Post-Ordering for Efficient Japanese-to-English Translation

  • Authors:
  • Katsuhito Sudoh;Xianchao Wu;Kevin Duh;Hajime Tsukada;Masaaki Nagata

  • Affiliations:
  • NTT Communication Science Laboratories;NTT Communication Science Laboratories;NTT Communication Science Laboratories;NTT Communication Science Laboratories;NTT Communication Science Laboratories

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing (TALIP)
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

This article proposes a novel reordering method for efficient two-step Japanese-to-English statistical machine translation (SMT) that isolates reordering from SMT and solves it after lexical translation. This reordering problem, called post-ordering, is solved as an SMT problem from Head-Final English (HFE) to English. HFE is syntax-based reordered English that is very successfully used for reordering with English-to-Japanese SMT. The proposed method incorporates its advantage into the reverse direction, Japanese-to-English, and solves the post-ordering problem by accurate syntax-based SMT with target language syntax. Two-step SMT with the proposed post-ordering empirically reduces the decoding time of the accurate but slow syntax-based SMT by its good approximation using intermediate HFE. The proposed method improves the decoding speed of syntax-based SMT decoding by about six times with comparable translation accuracy in Japanese-to-English patent translation experiments.