Otedama: Fast Rule-Based Pre-Ordering for Machine Translation

• Main Authors: Hitschler Julian, Jehl Laura, Karimova Sariya, Ohta Mayumi, Körner Benjamin, Riezler Stefan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2016-10-01
• Series: Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/pralin-2016-0015

We present Otedama, a fast, open-source tool for rule-based syntactic pre-ordering, a well established technique in statistical machine translation. Otedama implements both a learner for pre-ordering rules, as well as a component for applying these rules to parsed sentences. Our system is compatible with several external parsers and capable of accommodating many source and all target languages in any machine translation paradigm which uses parallel training data. We demonstrate improvements on a patent translation task over a state-of-the-art English-Japanese hierarchical phrase-based machine translation system. We compare Otedama with an existing syntax-based pre-ordering system, showing comparable translation performance at a runtime speedup of a factor of 4.5-10.