A Unified Model for Soft Linguistic Reordering Constraints in Statistical Machine Translation
Junhui Li, Yuval Marton, Philip Resnik, Hal Daumé · 2014
This paper explores a simple and effective unified framework for incorporating soft linguistic reordering constraints into a hierarchical phrase-based translation system: 1) a syntactic reordering model that explores reorderings for context free grammar rules; and 2) a semantic reordering model that focuses on the reordering of predicate-argument structures.We develop novel features based on both models and use them as soft constraints to guide the translation process.Experiments on Chinese-English translation show that the reordering approach can significantly improve a state-of-the-art hierarchical phrase-based translation system.However, the gain achieved by the semantic reordering model is limited in the presence of the syntactic reordering model, and we therefore provide a detailed analysis of the behavior differences between the two.