Abstract
This paper investigates the combination of word-alignments computed with the competitive linking algorithm and well-established IBM models. New training methods for phrase-based statistical translation are proposed, which have been evaluated on a popular traveling domain task, with English as target language, and Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Italian as source languages. Experiments were performed with a highly competitive phrase-based translation system, which ranked at the top in the 2005 IWSLT evaluation campaign. By applying the proposed techniques, even under very different data-sparseness conditions, consistent improvements in BLEU and NIST scores were obtained on all considered language pairs.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Och, F.J., Ney, H.: Improved statistical alignment models. In: Proceeding of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Hongkong, China, pp. 440–447 (2000)
Brown, P.F., Della Pietra, S.A., Della Pietra, V.J., Mercer, R.L.: The mathematics of statistical machine translation: Parameter estimation. Computational Linguistics 19, 263–312 (1993)
Koehn, P., Och, F.J., Marcu, D.: Statistical phrase-based translation. In: Proceedings of HLT/NAACL 2003, Edmonton, Canada, pp. 127–133 (2003)
Melamed, I.D.: Models of translational equivalence among words. Computational Linguistics 26, 221–249 (2000)
Cherry, C., Lin, D.: A probability model to improve word alignment. In: Proceedings of the 41st Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Sapporo, Japan, pp. 88–95 (2003)
Kraif, O., Chen, B.: Combining clues for lexical level aligning using the null hypothesis approach. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), Geneva, Switzerland, pp. 1261–1264 (2004)
Moore, R.C.: Association-based bilingual word alignment. In: Proceedings of ACL Workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts, Ann Arbor, MI, pp. 1–8 (2005)
Och, F.J., Ney, H.: A systematic comparison of various statistical alignment models. Computational Linguistics 29, 19–51 (2003)
Akiba, Y., Federico, M., Kando, N., Nakaiwa, H., Paul, M., Tsujii, J.: Overview of the iwslt04 evaluation campaign. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT), Kyoto, Japan, pp. 1–12 (2004)
Eck, M., Hori, C.: Overview of the iwslt 2005 evaluation campaign. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT), Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 11–32 (2005)
Federico, M., Bertoldi, N.: A word-to-phrase statistical translation model. ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing 2, 1–24 (2005)
Tillmann, C., Ney, H.: Word reordering and a dynamic programming beam search algorithm for statistical machine translation. Computational Linguistics 29, 97–133 (2003)
Chen, B., Cattoni, R., Bertoldi, N., Cettolo, M., Federico, M.: The itc-irst smt system for iwslt 2005. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation - IWSLT, Pittsburgh, USA, pp. 98–104 (2005)
Och, F.J.: Minimum error rate training in statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 41st Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Sapporo, Japan, pp. 160–167 (2003)
Och, F.J., Tillman, C., Ney, H.: Improved alignment models for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 1999 Joint SIGDAT Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Very Large Corpora, University of Maryland, MDPA, pp. 20–28 (1999)
Kikui, G., Sumita, E., Takezawa, T., Yamamoto, S.: Creating corpora for speech-to-speech translation. In: Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, Madrid, Spain, vol. 2, pp. 1249–1252 (1995)
Papineni, K., Roukos, S., Ward, T., Zhu, W.J.: Bleu: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. Research Report RC22176, IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chen, B., Federico, M. (2006). Improving Phrase-Based Statistical Translation Through Combination of Word Alignments. In: Salakoski, T., Ginter, F., Pyysalo, S., Pahikkala, T. (eds) Advances in Natural Language Processing. FinTAL 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4139. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11816508_37
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11816508_37
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-37334-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-37336-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)