Incremental syntactic language models for phrase-based translation

This paper describes a novel technique for incorporating syntactic knowledge into phrasebased machine translation through incremental syntactic parsing. Bottom-up and topdown parsers typically require a completed string as input. This requirement makes it difficult to incorporate them into phrase-based translation, which generates partial hypothesized translations from left-to-right. Incremental syntactic language models score sentences in a similar left-to-right fashion, and are therefore a good mechanism for incorporating syntax into phrase-based translation. We give a formal definition of one such lineartime syntactic language model, detail its relation to phrase-based decoding, and integrate the model with the Moses phrase-based translation system. We present empirical results on a constrained Urdu-English translation task that demonstrate a significant BLEU score improvement and a large decrease in perplexity.