Yandex School of Data Analysis Russian-English Machine Translation System for WMT14

This paper describes the Yandex School of Data Analysis Russian-English system submitted to the ACL 2014 Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation shared translation task. We start with the system that we developed last year and investigate a few methods that were successful at the previous translation task including unpruned language model, operation sequence model and the new reparameterization of IBM Model 2. Next we propose a {simple yet practical} algorithm to transform Russian sentence into a more easily translatable form before decoding. The algorithm is based on the linguistic intuition of native Russian speakers, also fluent in English.