11,001 New Features for Statistical Machine Translation

David Chiang, Kevin Knight, Wei Wang

Abstract: We use the Margin Infused Relaxed Algorithm of Crammer et al. to add a large number of new features to two machine translation systems: the Hiero hierarchical phrase-based translation system and our syntax-based translation system. On a large-scale Chinese-English translation task, we obtain statistically significant improvements of +1.5 Bleu and + 1.1 Bleu, respectively. We analyze the impact of the new features and the performance of the learning algorithm.