Training phrase-based SMT without explicit word alignment

Abstract

The machine translation systems usually build an initial word-to-word alignment, before training the phrase translation pairs. This approach requires a lot of matching between different single words of both considered languages. In this paper, we propose a new approach for phrase-based machine translation which does not require any word alignment. This method is based on inter-lingual triggers retrieved by Multivariate Mutual Information. This algorithm segments sentences into phrases and finds their alignments simultaneously. The main objective of this work is to build directly valid alignments between source and target phrases. The achieved results, in terms of performance are satisfactory and the obtained translation table is smaller than the reference one; this approach could be considered as an alternative to the classical methods. Index Terms: Statistical Machine Translation, Inter-lingual triggers, Multivariate Mutual Information. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.