Parallelizing a machine translation decoder for multicore computer

Abstract

Machine translation (MT), with its broad potential use, has gained increased attention from both researchers and software vendors. To generate high quality translations, however, MT decoders can be highly computation intensive. With significant raw computing power, multi-core microprocessors have the potential to speed up MT software on desktop machines. However, retrofitting existing MT decoders is a nontrivial issue. Race conditions and atomicity issues are among those complications making parallelization difficult. In this article, we show that, to parallelize a state-of-the-art MT decoder, it is much easier to overcome such difficulties by using a process-based parallelization method, called functional task parallelism, than using conventional thread-based methods. We achieve a 7.60 times speed up on an 8-core desktop machine while making significantly less changes to the original sequential code than required by using multiple threads.