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Word Alignment-Based Reordering of Source Chunks in PB-SMT

Reordering poses a big challenge in statistical machine translation between distant language pairs. The paper presents how reordering between distant language pairs can be handled efficiently in phrase-based statistical machine translation. The problem of reordering between distant languages has been approached with prior reordering of the source text at chunk level to simulate the target language ordering. Prior reordering of the source chunks is performed in the present work by following the target word order suggested by word alignment. The testset is reordered using monolingual MT trained on source and reordered source. This approach of prior reordering of the source chunks was compared with pre-ordering of source words based on word alignments and the traditional approach of prior source reordering based on language-pair specific reordering rules. The effects of these reordering approaches were studied on an English–Bengali translation task, a language pair with different word order. From the experimental results it was found that word alignment based reordering of the source chunks is more effective than the other reordering approaches, and it produces statistically significant improvements over the baseline system on BLEU. On manual inspection we found significant improvements in terms of word alignments.