Forest Rescoring: Faster Decoding with Integrated Language Models

Abstract

Efficient decoding has been a fundamental problem in machine translation, especially with an integrated language model which is essential for achieving good translation quality. We develop faster approaches for this problem based on k-best parsing algorithms and demonstrate their effectiveness on both phrase-based and syntax-based MT systems. In both cases, our methods achieve significant speed improvements, often by more than a factor of ten, over the conventional beam-search method at the same levels of search error and translation accuracy. 1