A Tunable Language Model for Statistical Machine Translation

A novel variation of modified KNESER-NEY model using monomial discounting is presented and integrated into the MOSES statistical machine translation toolkit. The language model is trained on a large training set as usual, but its new discount parameters are tuned to the small development set. An in-domain and cross-domain evaluation of the language model is per-formed based on perplexity, in which sizable improvements are obtained. Additionally, the performance of the language model is also evaluated in several major machine translation tasks including Chinese-to-English. In those tests, the test data is from a (slightly) different do-main than the training data. The experimental results indicate that the new model significantly outperforms a baseline model using SRILM in those domain adaptation scenarios. The new language model is thus ideally suited for domain adaptation without sacrificing performance on in-domain experiments.