Language Model Adaptation for Statistical Machine Translation Based on Information Retrieval

Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004)

Abstract

Language modeling is an important part for both speech recognition and machine translation systems. Adaptation has been successfully applied to language models for speech recognition. In this paper we present experiments concerning language model adaptation for statistical machine translation. We develop a method to adapt language models using information retrieval methods. The adapted language models drastically reduce perplexity over a general language model and we can show that it is possible to improve the translation quality of a statistical machine translation using those adapted language models instead of a general language model.