Coarse-to-fine syntactic machine translation using language projections

Abstract

The intersection of tree transducer-based translation models with n-gram language models results in huge dynamic programs for machine translation decoding. We propose a multipass, coarse-to-fine approach in which the language model complexity is incrementally introduced. In contrast to previous order-based bigram-to-trigram approaches, we focus on encoding-based methods, which use a clustered 1encoding of the target language. Across various encoding schemes, and for multiple language pairs, we show speed-ups of up to 50 times over single-pass decoding while improving BLEU score. Moreover, our entire decoding cascade for trigram language models is faster than the corresponding bigram pass alone of a bigram-to-trigram decoder. © 2008 Association for Computational Linguistics.