Improving fast_align by Reordering
Chenchen Ding, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita · 2015
fast align is a simple, fast, and efficient approach for word alignment based on the IBM model 2. fast align performs well for language pairs with relatively similar word orders; however, it does not perform well for language pairs with drastically different word orders.We propose a segmenting-reversing reordering process to solve this problem by alternately applying fast align and reordering source sentences during training.Experimental results with Japanese-English translation demonstrate that the proposed approach improves the performance of fast align significantly without the loss of efficiency.Experiments using other languages are also reported.