An Orientation Model for Hierarchical Phrase-Based Translation

Abstract

The hierarchical phrase-based (HPB) translation exploits the power of grammar to perform long distance reorderings, without specifying nonterminal orientations against adjacent blocks or considering the lexical information covered by nonterminals. In this paper, we borrow from phrase-based system the idea of orientation model to enhance the reordering ability of HPB translation. We distinguish three orientations (monotone, swap, discontinuous) of a nonterminal based on the alignment of grammar, and select the appropriate orientation of nonterminal using lexical information covered by it. By incorporating the orientation model, our approach significantly outperforms a standard HPB system up to 1.02 Bleu on large scale NIST Chinese-English translation task, and 0.51 Bleu on WMT German-English translation task.