Machine Translation System Combination by Confusion Forest

The state-of-the-art system combination method for machine translation (MT) is based on confusion networks constructed by aligning hypotheses with regard to word similarities. We introduce a novel system combination framework in which hypotheses are encoded as a confusion forest, a packed forest representing alternative trees. The forest is generated using syntactic consensus among parsed hypotheses: First, MT outputs are parsed. Second, a context free grammar is learned by extracting a set of rules that con-stitute the parse trees. Third, a packed forest is generated starting from the root symbol of the extracted grammar through non-terminal rewriting. The new hypothesis is produced by searching the best derivation in the forest. Experimental results on the WMT10 system combination shared task yield comparable performance to the conventional confusion network based method with smaller space.