Mixture-model adaptation for SMT

Abstract

We describe a mixture-model approach to adapting a Statistical Machine Translation System for new domains, using weights that depend on text distances to mixture compo-nents. We investigate a number of variants on this approach, including cross-domain versus dynamic adaptation; linear versus loglinear mixtures; language and transla-tion model adaptation; different methods of assigning weights; and granularity of the source unit being adapted to. The best methods achieve gains of approximately one BLEU percentage point over a state-of-the art non-adapted baseline system. 1