What is hidden among translation rules

Most of the machine translation systems rely on a large set of translation rules. These rules are treated as discrete and independent events. In this short paper, we propose a novel method to model rules as observed generation output of a compact hidden model, which leads to better generalization capability. We present a preliminary generative model to test this idea. Experimental results show about one point improvement on TER-BLEU over a strong baseline in Chinese-to-English translation.