Scalable Reordering Models for SMT based on Multiclass SVM

In state-of-the-art phrase-based statistical machine translation systems, modelling phrase reorderings is an important need to enhance naturalness of the translated outputs, particularly when the grammatical structures of the language pairs differ significantly. Posing phrasemovements as a classification problem, we exploit recent developments in solving large-scale multiclass support vector machines. Using dual coordinate descent methods for learning, we provide a mechanism to shrink the amount of training data required for each iteration. Hence, we produce significant computational savingwhile preserving the accuracy of themodels. Our approach is a couple of times faster thanmaximum entropy approach andmorememory-efficient (50% reduction). Experiments were carried out on an Arabic-English corpus with more than a quarter of a billion words. We achieve BLEU score improvements on top of a strong baseline system with sparse reordering features.