How phrase sense disambiguation outperforms word sense disambiguation for statistical machine translation

We present comparative empirical evidence arguing that a generalized phrase sense disambiguation approach better improves statistical machine translation than ordinary word sense disambiguation, along with a data analysis suggesting the reasons for this. Standalone word sense disambiguation, as exemplified by the Senseval series of evaluations, typically defines the target of disambiguation as a single word. But in order to be useful in statistical machine translation, our studies indicate that word sense disambiguation should be redefined to move beyond the particular case of single word targets, and instead to generalize to multi-word phrase targets. We investigate how and why the phrase sense disambiguation approach—in contrast to recent efforts to apply traditional word sense disambiguation to SMT—is able to yield statistically significant yimprovements in translation quality even under large data conditions, and consistently improve SMT across both IWSLT and NIST Chinese-English text translation tasks. We discuss architectural issues raised by this change of perspective, and consider the new model architecture necessitated by the phrase sense disambiguation approach. This material is based upon work supported in part by