Max-Margin Synchronous Grammar Induction for Machine Translation

Xinyan Xiao, Deyi Xiong

Abstract: 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 features 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.