Dependency-based Pre-ordering for Chinese-English Machine Translation

Jingsheng Cai, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita, Yujie Zhang

Abstract: In statistical machine translation (SMT), syntax-based pre-ordering of the source language is an effective method for dealing with language pairs where there are great differences in their respective word orders. This paper introduces a novel pre-ordering approach based on dependency parsing for Chinese-English SMT. We present a set of dependency-based preordering rules which improved the BLEU score by 1.61 on the NIST 2006 evaluation data. We also investigate the accuracy of the rule set by conducting human evaluations.