An exponential translation model for target language morphology

Abstract

This paper presents an exponential model for translation into highly inflected languages which can be scaled to very large datasets. As in other recent proposals, it predicts targetside phrases and can be conditioned on sourceside context. However, crucially for the task of modeling morphological generalizations, it estimates feature parameters from the entire training set rather than as a collection of separate classifiers. We apply it to English-Czech translation, using a variety of features capturing potential predictors for case, number, and gender, and one of the largest publicly available parallel data sets. We also describe generation and modeling of inflected forms unobserved in training data and decoding procedures for a model with non-local target-side feature dependencies. 1