Syntax-based rewriting for simultaneous machine translation

Abstract

Divergent word order between languages causes delay in simultaneous machine translation. We present a sentence rewriting method that generates more monotonic translations to improve the speedaccuracy tradeoff. We design grammaticality and meaning-preserving syntactic transformation rules that operate on constituent parse trees. We apply the rules to reference translations to make their word order closer to the source language word order. On Japanese-English translation (two languages with substantially different structure), incorporating the rewritten, more monotonic reference translation into a phrase-based machine translation system enables better translations faster than a baseline system that only uses gold reference translations.