Large aligned treebanks for syntax-based machine translation

Abstract

We present a collection of parallel treebanks that have been automatically aligned on both the terminal and the non-terminal constituent level for use in syntax-based machine translation. We describe how they were constructed and applied to a syntax- and example-based machine translation system called Parse and Corpus-Based Machine Translation (PaCo-MT). For the language pair Dutch to English, we present non-terminal alignment evaluation scores for a variety of tree alignment approaches. Finally, based on the parallel treebanks created by these approaches, we evaluate the MT system itself and compare the scores with those of Moses, a current state-of-the-art statistical MT system, when trained on the same data.