While SMT systems can learn to translate multiword expressions (MWEs) from parallel text, they typically have no notion of non-compositionality, and thus overgeneralise translations that are only used in certain contexts. This paper describes a novel approach to measure the flexibility of a phrase pair, i.e. its tendency to occur in many contexts, in contrast to phrase pairs that are only valid in one or a few fixed expressions. The measure learns from the parallel training text, is simple to implement and language independent. We argue that flexible phrase pairs should be preferred over inflexible ones, and present experiments with phrase-based and hierarchical translation models in which we observe performance gains of up to 0.9 BLEU points.
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