Improvements in dynamic programming beam search for phrase-based statistical machine translation.

Richard Zens, Hermann Ney


Abstract
Search is a central component of any statistical machine translation system. We describe the search for phrase-based SMT in detail and show its importance for achieving good translation quality. We introduce an explicit distinction between reordering and lexical hypotheses and organize the pruning accordingly. We show that for the large Chinese-English NIST task already a small number of lexical alternatives is sufficient, whereas a large number of reordering hypotheses is required to achieve good translation quality. The resulting system compares favorably with the current stateof-the-art, in particular we perform a comparison with cube pruning as well as with Moses.
Anthology ID:
2008.iwslt-papers.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers
Month:
October 20-21
Year:
2008
Address:
Waikiki, Hawaii
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
Note:
Pages:
195–205
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2008.iwslt-papers.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Richard Zens and Hermann Ney. 2008. Improvements in dynamic programming beam search for phrase-based statistical machine translation.. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers, pages 195–205, Waikiki, Hawaii.
Cite (Informal):
Improvements in dynamic programming beam search for phrase-based statistical machine translation. (Zens & Ney, IWSLT 2008)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2008.iwslt-papers.8.pdf