Fertility-based Source-Language-biased Inversion Transduction Grammar for Word Alignment

Abstract

We propose a version of Inversion Transduction Grammar (ITG) model with IBM-style notation of fertility to improve word-alignment performance. In our approach, binary context-free grammar rules of the source language, accompanied by orientation preferences of the target language and fertilities of words, are leveraged to construct a syntax-based statistical translation model. Our model, inherently possessing the characteristics of ITG restrictions and allowing for many consecutive words aligned to one and vice-versa, outperforms the Bracketing Transduction Grammar (BTG) model and GIZA++, a state-of-the-art word aligner, not only in alignment error rate (23% and 14% error reduction) but also in consistent phrase error rate (13% and 9% error reduction). Better performance in these two evaluation metrics suggests that, based on our word alignment result, more accurate phrase pairs may be acquired, leading to better machine translation quality.