Quasi-Synchronous Phrase Dependency Grammars for Machine Translation

We present a quasi-synchronous dependency grammar (Smith and Eisner, 2006) for machine translation in which the leaves of the tree are phrases rather than words as in previous work (Gimpel and Smith, 2009). This formulation allows us to combine structural components of phrase-based and syntax-based MT in a single model. We describe a method of extracting phrase dependencies from parallel text using a target-side dependency parser. For decoding, we describe a coarse-to-fine approach based on lattice dependency parsing of phrase lattices. We demonstrate performance improvements for Chinese-English and UrduEnglish translation over a phrase-based baseline. We also investigate the use of unsupervised dependency parsers, reporting encouraging preliminary results.