Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation

In this paper, we describe a sourceside reordering method based on syntactic chunks for phrase-based statistical machine translation. First, we shallow parse the source language sentences. Then, reordering rules are automatically learned from source-side chunks and word alignments. During translation, the rules are used to generate a reordering lattice for each sentence. Experimental results are reported for a Chinese-to-English task, showing an improvement of 0.5%–1.8% BLEU score absolute on various test sets and better computational efficiency than reordering during decoding. The experiments also show that the reordering at the chunk-level performs better than at the POS-level.