Gappy Translation Units under Left-to-Right SMT Decoding
Josep Crego, François Yvon · 2009
This paper presents an extension for a bilingual n-gram statistical machine translation (SMT) system based on al-lowing translation units with gaps. Our gappy translation units can be seen as a first step towards introducing hierar-chical units similar to those employed in hierarchical MT systems. Our goal is double. On the one hand we aim at capturing the benefits of the higher generalization power shown by hierar-chical systems. On the other hand, we want to avoid the computational bur-den of decoding based on parsing tech-niques, which among other drawbacks, make difficult the introduction of the required target language model costs. Our experiments show slight but con-sistent improvements for Chinese-to-English machine translation. Accu-racy results are competitive with those achieved by a state-of-the-art phrase-based system. 1