Translation with Source Constituency and Dependency Trees

Fandong Meng, Jun Xie, Linfeng Song, Yajuan Lü, Qun Liu

Abstract: We present a novel translation model, which simultaneously exploits the constituency and dependency trees on the source side, to combine the advantages of two types of trees. We take head-dependents relations of dependency trees as backbone and incorporate phrasal nodes of constituency trees as the source side of our translation rules, and the target side as strings. Our rules hold the property of long distance reorderings and the compatibility with phrases. Large-scale experimental results show that our model achieves significantly improvements over the constituency-to-string (+2.45 BLEU on average) and dependencyto-string (+0.91 BLEU on average) models, which only employ single type of trees, and significantly outperforms the state-of-theart hierarchical phrase-based model (+1.12 BLEU on average), on three Chinese-English NIST test sets.