Do We Need Phrases? Challenging The Conventional Wisdom In Statistical Machine Translation

Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2006 |

Published by ACL/SIGPARSE

We begin by exploring theoretical and practical issues with phrasal SMT, several of which are addressed by syntax-based SMT. Next, to address problems not handled by syntax, we propose the concept of a Minimal Translation Unit (MTU) and develop MTU sequence models. Finally we incorporate these models into a syntax-based SMT system and demonstrate that it improves on the state of the art translation quality within a theoretically more desirable framework.