Max-Margin Synchronous Grammar Induction for Machine Translation

Xinyan Xiao, Deyi Xiong
2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing  
Traditional synchronous grammar induction estimates parameters by maximizing likelihood, which only has a loose relation to translation quality. Alternatively, we propose a max-margin estimation approach to discriminatively inducing synchronous grammars for machine translation, which directly optimizes translation quality measured by BLEU. In the max-margin estimation of parameters, we only need to calculate Viterbi translations. This further facilitates the incorporation of various non-local
more » ... atures that are defined on the target side. We test the effectiveness of our max-margin estimation framework on a competitive hierarchical phrase-based system. Experiments show that our max-margin method significantly outperforms the traditional twostep pipeline for synchronous rule extraction by 1.3 BLEU points and is also better than previous max-likelihood estimation method.
dblp:conf/emnlp/XiaoX13 fatcat:behu5l6oprg7rdetprjamgsoia