Automatic Projection of Semantic Structures: an Application to Pairwise Translation Ranking

We present a model for the inclusion of semantic role annotations in the framework of confidence estimation for machine translation. The model has several interesting properties, most notably: 1) it only requires a linguistic processor on the (generally well-formed) source side of the translation; 2) it does not directly rely on properties of the translation model (hence, it can be applied beyond phrase-based systems). These features make it potentially appealing for system ranking, translation re-ranking and user feedback evaluation. Preliminary experiments in pairwise hypothesis ranking on five confidence estimation benchmarks show that the model has the potential to capture salient aspects of translation quality.