Rule-based preordering on multiple syntactic levels in statistical machine translation

Ge Wu, Yuqi Zhang, Alexander Waibel


Abstract
We propose a novel data-driven rule-based preordering approach, which uses the tree information of multiple syntactic levels. This approach extend the tree-based reordering from one level into multiple levels, which has the capability to process more complicated reordering cases. We have conducted experiments in English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation directions. Our results show that the approach has led to improved translation quality both when it was applied separately or when it was combined with some other reordering approaches. As our reordering approach was used alone, it showed an improvement of 1.61 in BLEU score in the English-to-Chinese translation direction and an improvement of 2.16 in BLEU score in the Chinese-to-English translation direction, in comparison with the baseline, which used no word reordering. As our preordering approach were combined with the short rule [1], long rule [2] and tree rule [3] based preordering approaches, it showed further improvements of up to 0.43 in BLEU score in the English-to-Chinese translation direction and further improvements of up to 0.3 in BLEU score in the Chinese-to-English translation direction. Through the translations that used our preordering approach, we have also found many translation examples with improved syntactic structures.
Anthology ID:
2014.iwslt-papers.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers
Month:
December 4-5
Year:
2014
Address:
Lake Tahoe, California
Editors:
Marcello Federico, Sebastian Stüker, François Yvon
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
Note:
Pages:
279–286
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2014.iwslt-papers.18
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ge Wu, Yuqi Zhang, and Alexander Waibel. 2014. Rule-based preordering on multiple syntactic levels in statistical machine translation. In Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers, pages 279–286, Lake Tahoe, California.
Cite (Informal):
Rule-based preordering on multiple syntactic levels in statistical machine translation (Wu et al., IWSLT 2014)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2014.iwslt-papers.18.pdf