The feature subspace method for SMT system combination

Abstract

Recently system combination has been shown to be an effective way to improve translation quality over single machine translation systems. In this paper, we present a simple and effective method to systematically derive an ensemble of SMT systems from one baseline linear SMT model for use in system combination. Each system in the resulting ensemble is based on a feature set derived from the features of the baseline model (typically a subset of it). We will discuss the principles to determine the feature sets for derived systems, and present in detail the system combination model used in our work. Evaluation is performed on the data sets for NIST 2004 and NIST 2005 Chinese-to-English machine translation tasks. Experimental results show that our method can bring significant improvements to baseline systems with state-of-the-art performance. © 2009 ACL and AFNLP.