Determining the placement of German verbs in English-to-German SMT

摘要

When translating English to German, existing reordering models often cannot model the long-range reorderings needed to generate German translations with verbs in the correct position. We reorder English as a preprocessing step for English-to-German SMT. We use a sequence of hand-crafted reordering rules applied to English parse trees. The reordering rules place English verbal elements in the positions within the clause they will have in the German translation. This is a difficult problem, as German verbal elements can appear in different positions within a clause (in contrast with English verbal elements, whose positions do not vary as much). We obtain a significant improvement in translation performance.