Vector Space Model for Adaptation in Statistical Machine Translation

This paper proposes a new approach to domain adaptation in statistical machine translation (SMT) based on a vector space model (VSM). The general idea is first to create a vector profile for the in-domain development (“dev”) set. This profile might, for instance, be a vector with a dimensionality equal to the number of training subcorpora; each entry in the vector reflects the contribution of a particular subcorpus to all the phrase pairs that can be extracted from the dev set. Then, for each phrase pair extracted from the training data, we create a vector with features defined in the same way, and calculate its similarity score with the vector representing the dev set. Thus, we obtain a decoding feature whose value represents the phrase pair’s closeness to the dev. This is a simple, computationally cheap form of instance weighting for phrase pairs. Experiments on large scale NIST evaluation data show improvements over strong baselines: +1.8 BLEU on Arabic to English and +1.4 BLEU on Chinese to English over a non-adapted baseline, and significant improvements in most circumstances over baselines with linear mixture model adaptation. An informal analysis suggests that VSM adaptation may help in making a good choice among words with the same meaning, on the basis of style and genre.