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Machine Translation

, Volume 24, Issue 2, pp 103–121 | Cite as

Monte Carlo techniques for phrase-based translation

  • Abhishek Arun
  • Barry Haddow
  • Philipp Koehn
  • Adam Lopez
  • Chris Dyer
  • Phil Blunsom
Article
First Online:
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Accepted:

Abstract

Recent advances in statistical machine translation have used approximate beam search for NP-complete inference within probabilistic translation models. We present an alternative approach of sampling from the posterior distribution defined by a translation model. We define a novel Gibbs sampler for sampling translations given a source sentence and show that it effectively explores this posterior distribution. In doing so we overcome the limitations of heuristic beam search and obtain theoretically sound solutions to inference problems such as finding the maximum probability translation and minimum risk training and decoding.

Keywords

Statistical machine translation Gibbs sampling Machine learning MCMC 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  • Abhishek Arun
    • 1
  • Barry Haddow
    • 1
  • Philipp Koehn
    • 1
  • Adam Lopez
    • 1
  • Chris Dyer
    • 2
  • Phil Blunsom
    • 3
  1. 1.University of EdinburghEdinburghUK
  2. 2.University of MarylandCollege ParkUSA
  3. 3.Oxford University Computing LaboratoryOxfordUK

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