Two-Neighbor Orientation model with cross-boundary global contexts

Long distance reordering remains one of the greatest challenges in statistical machine translation research as the key contextual information may well be beyond the confine of translation units. In this paper, we propose Two-Neighbor Orientation (TNO) model that jointly models the orientation decisions between anchors and two neighboring multi-unit chunks which may cross phrase or rule boundaries. We explicitly model the longest span of such chunks, referred to as Maximal Orientation Span, to serve as a global parameter that constrains underlying local decisions. We integrate our proposed model into a state-of-the-art string-to-dependency translation system and demonstrate the efficacy of our proposal in a large-scale Chinese-to-English translation task. On NIST MT08 set, our most advanced model brings around +2.0 BLEU and -1.0 TER improvement. © 2013 Association for Computational Linguistics.