Comparing Reordering Constraints for SMT Using Efficient BLEU Oracle Computation

Abstract

This paper describes a new method to compare reordering constraints for Statistical Machine Translation. We investigate the best possible (oracle) BLEU score achievable under different reordering constraints. Using dynamic programming, we efficiently find a reordering that approximates the highest attainable BLEU score given a reference and a set of reordering constraints. We present an empirical evaluation of popular reordering constraints: local constraints, the IBM constraints, and the Inversion Transduction Grammar (ITG) constraints. We present results for a German-English translation task and show that reordering under the ITG constraints can improve over the baseline by more than 7.5 BLEU points.

Publication
Proceedings of SSST, NAACL-HLT 2007 / AMTA Workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation

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