Skip to main content

A Simple, Fast Strategy for Weighted Alignment Hypergraph

  • Conference paper
Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC 2013)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 400))

  • 1825 Accesses

Abstract

Weighted alignment hypergraph [4] is potentially useful for statistical machine translation, because it is the first study to simultaneously exploit the compact representation and fertility model of word alignment. Since estimating the probabilities of rules extracted from hypergraphs is an NP-complete problem, they propose a divide-and-conquer strategy by decomposing a hypergraph into a set of independent subhypergraphs. However, they employ a Bull’s algorithm to enumerate all consistent alignments for each rule in each subhypergraph, which is very time-consuming especially for the rules that contain non-terminals. This limits the applicability of this method to the syntax translation models, the rules of which contain many non-terminals (e.g. SCFG rules). In response to this problem, we propose an inside-outside algorithm to efficiently enumerate the consistent alignments. Experimental results show that our method is twice as fast as the Bull’s algorithm. In addition, the efficient dynamic programming algorithm makes our approach applicable to syntax-based translation models.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Brown, P.E., Pietra, S.A.D., Pietra, V.J.D., Mercer, R.L.: The mathematics of statistical machine translation: Parameter estimation. Computational Linguistics 19(2), 263–311 (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Chiang, D.: Hierarchical phrase-based translation. Computational Linguistics 33(2), 201–228 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Koehn, P., Och, F.J., Marcu, D.: Statistical phrase-based translation. In: Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Human Language Technology, vol. 1, pp. 48–54. Association for Computational Linguistics (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Liu, Q., Tu, Z., Lin, S.: A Novel Graph-based Compact Representation of Word Alignment. In: Proceedings of the 51th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Liu, Y., Xia, T., Xiao, X., Liu, Q.: Weighted alignment matrices for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1017–1026. Association for Computational Linguistics, Singapore (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Moore, R.C.: A discriminative framework for bilingual word alignment. In: Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 81–88. Association for Computational Linguistics, Vancouver (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Tu, Z., Jiang, W., Liu, Q., Lin, S.: Dependency Forest for Sentiment Analysis. In: Zhou, M., Zhou, G., Zhao, D., Liu, Q., Zou, L. (eds.) NLPCC 2012. CCIS, vol. 333, pp. 69–77. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  8. Tu, Z., Liu, Y., He, Y., van Genabith, J., Liu, Q., Lin, S.: Combining Multiple Alignments to Improve Machine Translation. In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Tu, Z., Liu, Y., Hwang, Y.-S., Liu, Q., Lin, S.: Dependency forest for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010), pp. 1092–1100. International Committee on Computational Linguistics, Beijing (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Tu, Z., Liu, Y., Liu, Q., Lin, S.: Extracting Hierarchical Rules from a Weighted Alignment Matrix. In: Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pp. 1294–1303. Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, Chiang Mai (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Venugopal, A., Zollmann, A., Smith, N.A., Vogel, S.: Wider pipelines: n-best alignments and parses in mt training. In: Proceedings of AMTA, Honolulu, Hawaii (2008)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Tu, Z., Xie, J., Lv, Y., Liu, Q. (2013). A Simple, Fast Strategy for Weighted Alignment Hypergraph. In: Zhou, G., Li, J., Zhao, D., Feng, Y. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing. NLPCC 2013. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 400. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41644-6_18

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41644-6_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41643-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41644-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics