In Statistical Machine Translation, reordering rules have proved useful in extracting bilingual phrases and in decoding during translation between languages that are structurally different. Linguistically motivated rules have been incorporated into Chinese-to-English (Wang et al., 2007) and English-to-Japanese (Isozaki et al., 2010b) translation with significant gains to the statistical translation system. Here, we carry out a linguistic analysis of the Chinese-to-Japanese translation problem and propose one of the first reordering rules for this language pair. Experimental results show substantially improvements (from 20.70 to 23.17 BLEU) when head-finalization rules based on HPSG parses are used, and further gains (to 24.14 BLEU) were obtained using more refined rules.
['Dan Han', 'Katsuhito Sudoh', 'Xianchao Wu', 'Kevin Duh', 'Hajime Tsukada', 'Masaaki Nagata']
Head Finalization Reordering for Chinese-to-Japanese Machine Translation