A survey of domain adaptation for statistical machine translation

Abstract

Differences in domains of language use between training data and test data have often been reported to result in performance degradation for phrase-based machine translation models. Throughout the past decade or so, a large body of work aimed at exploring domain-adaptation methods to improve system performance in the face of such domain differences. This paper provides a systematic survey of domain-adaptation methods for phrase-based machine-translation systems. The survey starts out with outlining the sources of errors in various components of phrase-based models due to domain change, including lexical selection, reordering and optimization. Subsequently, it outlines the different research lines to domain adaptation in the literature, and surveys the existing work within these research lines, discussing how these approaches differ and how they relate to each other.