A forced derivation tree (FDT) of a sentence pair {ƒ, e} denotes a derivation tree that can translate ƒ into its accurate target translation e. In this paper, we present an approach that leverages structured knowledge contained in FDTs to train component models for statistical machine translation (SMT) systems. We first describe how to generate different FDTs for each sentence pair in training corpus, and then present how to infer the optimal FDTs based on their derivation and alignment qualities. As the first step in this line of research, we verify the effectiveness of our approach in a BTG-based phrasal system, and propose four FDT-based component models. Experiments are carried out on large scale English-to-Japanese and Chinese-to-English translation tasks, and significant improvements are reported on both translation quality and alignment quality.
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