Ordering Phrases with Function Words
Hendra Setiawan, Min‐Yen Kan, Haizhou Li · 2007
This paper presents a Function Word cen-tered, Syntax-based (FWS) solution to ad-dress phrase ordering in the context of statistical machine translation (SMT). Mo-tivated by the observation that function words often encode grammatical relation-ship among phrases within a sentence, we propose a probabilistic synchronous gram-mar to model the ordering of function words and their left and right arguments. We im-prove phrase ordering performance by lexi-calizing the resulting rules in a small number of cases corresponding to function words. The experiments show that the FWS ap-proach consistently outperforms the base-line system in ordering function words ’ ar-guments and improving translation quality in both perfect and noisy word alignment scenarios. 1