Joint parsing and translation

Abstract

Tree-based translation models, which exploit the linguistic syntax of source language, usually separate decoding into two steps: parsing and translation. Although this separation makes tree-based decoding simple and efficient, its translation performance is usually limited by the number of parse trees offered by parser. Alternatively, we propose to parse and translate jointly by casting tree-based translation as parsing. Given a source-language sentence, our joint decoder produces a parse tree on the source side and a translation on the target side simultaneously. By combining translation and parsing models in a discriminative framework, our approach significantly outperforms a forest based tree-to-string system by 1.1 absolute BLEU points on the NIST 2005 Chinese-English test set. As a parser, our joint decoder achieves an F1 score of 80.6% on the Penn Chinese Treebank.