Topological ordering of function words in hierarchical phrase-based translation
Hendra Setiawan, Min‐Yen Kan, Haizhou Li, Philip Resnik · 2009
Hierarchical phrase-based models are attractive because they provide a consistent framework within which to characterize both local and long-distance reorderings, but they also make it difcult to distinguish many implausible reorderings from those that are linguistically plausible.Rather than appealing to annotationdriven syntactic modeling, we address this problem by observing the inuential role of function words in determining syntactic structure, and introducing soft constraints on function word relationships as part of a standard log-linear hierarchical phrase-based model.Experimentation on Chinese-English and Arabic-Englishtranslation demonstrates that the approach yields signicant gains in performance.1 X a ⇒ X b , computers and X b ⇒ X c X d , computers and X c are X d ⇒ X d , computers and cell phones are X d ⇒ X e , computers and cell phones are inventions of X e ⇒ , computers and cell phones are inventions of the last century Figure 2: The derivation that leads to the correct translation X d ⇒ X a , inventions of X a ⇒ X b , inventions of computers and X b ⇒ X c X e , inventions of computers and X c are X e ⇒ X e , inventions of computers and cell phones are X e ⇒ , inventions of computers and cell phones are the last century