Introducing a Translation Dictionary into Phrase-Based SMT

Abstract

This paper presents a method to effectively introduce a translation dictionary into phrase-based SMT. Though SMT systems can be built with only a parallel corpus, translation dictionaries are more widely available and have many more entries than parallel corpora. A simple and low-cost method to introduce a translation dictionary is to attach a dictionary entry into a phrase table. This, however, does not work well. Target word order and even whole target sentences are often incorrect. To solve this problem, the proposed method uses high-frequency words in the training corpus. The high-frequency words may already be trained well; in other words, they may appear in the phrase table and therefore be translated with correct word order. Experimental results show the proposed method as far superior to simply attaching dictionary entries into phrase tables.