Semantic cohesion model for phrase-based SMT

In this paper, we propose a novel semantic cohesion model. Our model utilizes the predicateargument structures as soft constraints and plays the role as a reordering model in the phrasebased statistical machine translation system. We build a translation system with GALE data. Experimental results on the NIST02, NIST03, NIST04, NIST05 and NIST08 Chinese-English tasks show that our model improves the baseline system by 0.93 BLEU 0.98 TER on average. We also compare our method with a syntax-augmented model (Cherry, 2008), and demonstrate the importance of predicate-argument semantics in machine translation. ? 2012 The COLING.EI