Analyzing the potential of source sentence reordering in statistical machine translation

Teresa Herrmann, Jochen Weiner, Jan Niehues, Alex Waibel


Abstract
We analyze the performance of source sentence reordering, a common reordering approach, using oracle experiments on German-English and English-German translation. First, we show that the potential of this approach is very promising. Compared to a monotone translation, the optimally reordered source sentence leads to improvements of up to 4.6 and 6.2 BLEU points, depending on the language. Furthermore, we perform a detailed evaluation of the different aspects of the approach. We analyze the impact of the restriction of the search space by reordering lattices and we can show that using more complex rule types for reordering results in better approximation of the optimally reordered source. However, a gap of about 3 to 3.8 BLEU points remains, presenting a promising perspective for research on extending the search space through better reordering rules. When evaluating the ranking of different reordering variants, the results reveal that the search for the best path in the lattice performs very well for German-English translation. For English-German translation there is potential for an improvement of up to 1.4 BLEU points through a better ranking of the different reordering possibilities in the reordering lattice.
Anthology ID:
2013.iwslt-papers.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers
Month:
December 5-6
Year:
2013
Address:
Heidelberg, Germany
Editor:
Joy Ying Zhang
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2013.iwslt-papers.11
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Teresa Herrmann, Jochen Weiner, Jan Niehues, and Alex Waibel. 2013. Analyzing the potential of source sentence reordering in statistical machine translation. In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers, Heidelberg, Germany.
Cite (Informal):
Analyzing the potential of source sentence reordering in statistical machine translation (Herrmann et al., IWSLT 2013)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2013.iwslt-papers.11.pdf