Training the phrase table by force-aligning (FA) the training data with the reference translation has been shown to improve the phrasal translation quality while significantly reducing the phrase table size on medium sized tasks. We apply this procedure to several large-scale tasks, with the primary goal of reducing model sizes without sacrificing translation quality. To deal with the noise in the automatically crawled parallel training data, we introduce on-demand word deletions, insertions, and backoffs to achieve over 99% successful alignment rate. We also add heuristics to avoid any increase in OOV rates. We are able to reduce already heavily pruned baseline phrase tables by more than 50% with little to no degradation in quality and occasionally slight improvement, without any increase in OOVs. We further introduce two global scaling factors for re-estimation of the phrase table via posterior phrase alignment probabilities and a modified absolute discounting method that can be applied to fractional counts.
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