Accuracy-Based Scoring for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation

Sergio Penkale, Yanjun May, Daniel Galron, Andy Way

Abstract
Although the scoring features of state-of-the-art Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PB-SMT) models are weighted so as to optimise an objective function measuring translation quality, the estimation of the features themselves does not have any relation to such quality metrics. In this paper, we introduce a translation quality-based feature to PB-SMT in a bid to improve the translation quality of the system. Our feature is estimated by averaging the edit-distance between phrase pairs involved in the translation of oracle sentences, chosen by automatic evaluation metrics from the N-best outputs of a baseline system, and phrase pairs occurring in the N-best list. Using our method, we report a statistically significant 2.11% relative improvement in BLEU score for the WMT 2009 Spanish-to-English translation task. We also report that using our method we can achieve statistically significant improvements over the baseline using many other MT evaluation metrics, and a substantial increase in speed and reduction in memory use (due to a reduction in phrase-table size of 87%) while maintaining significant gains in translation quality.
Anthology ID:
2010.amta-papers.28
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Research Papers
Month:
October 31-November 4
Year:
2010
Address:
Denver, Colorado, USA
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AMTA
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Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2010.amta-papers.28
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Cite (ACL):
Sergio Penkale, Yanjun May, Daniel Galron, and Andy Way. 2010. Accuracy-Based Scoring for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Research Papers, Denver, Colorado, USA. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
Accuracy-Based Scoring for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (Penkale et al., AMTA 2010)
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