Bootstrapping Word Alignment via Word Packing

We introduce a simple method to pack words for statistical word alignment. Our goal is to simplify the task of automatic word alignment by packing several consecutive words together when we believe they correspond to a single word in the opposite language. This is done using the word aligner itself, i.e. by bootstrapping on its output. We evaluate the performance of our approach on a Chinese-to-English machine translation task, and report a 12.2% relative increase in BLEU score over a state-of-the art phrasebased SMT system.

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