Tuning Statistical Machine Translation Parameters

Word alignment is the basis of statistical machine translation. GIZA++ is a popular tool for producing word alignments and translation models. It uses a set of parameters that affect the quality of word alignments and translation models. These parameters exist to overcome some problems such as overfitting. This paper addresses the problem of tuning GIZA++ parameter for better translation quality. The results show that our systematic procedure for parameter tuning can improve the translation quality.