Boostrapping word alignment via word packing

We introduce a simple method to pack words for statistical word alignment. Our goal is to simplify the task of automatic word align-ment by packing several consecutive words together when we believe they correspond to a single word in the opposite language. This is done using the word aligner itself, i.e. by bootstrapping on its output. We evaluate the performance of our approach on a Chinese-to-English machine translation task, and report a 12.2 % relative increase in BLEU score over a state-of-the art phrase-based SMT system.