Two-Step Machine Translation with Lattices

Abstract

The idea of two-step machine translation was introduced to divide the complexity of the search space into two independent steps: (1) lexical translation and reordering, and (2) conjugation and declination in the target language. In this paper, we extend the two-step machine translation structure by replacing state-of-the-art phrase-based machine translation with the hierarchical machine translation in the 1st step. We further extend the fixed string-based input format of the 2nd step with word lattices (Dyer et al., 2008); this provides the 2nd step with the opportunity to choose among a sample of possible reorderings instead of relying on the single best one as produced by the 1st step.

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