Integrating Translation Memory into Phrase-Based Machine Translation during Decoding

Since statistical machine translation (SMT) and translation memory (TM) complement each other in matched and unmatched regions, integrated models are proposed in this paper to incorporate TM information into phrase-based SMT. Unlike previous multi-stage pipeline approaches, which directly merge TM result into the final output, the proposed models refer to the corresponding TM information associated with each phrase at SMT decoding. On a Chinese–English TM database, our experiments show that the proposed integrated Model-III is significantly better than either the SMT or the TM systems when the fuzzy match score is above 0.4. Furthermore, integrated Model-III achieves overall 3.48 BLEU points improvement and 2.62 TER points reduction in comparison with the pure SMT system. Besides, the proposed models also outperform previous approaches significantly.