Stat-XFER: A General Search-Based Syntax-Driven Framework for Machine Translation

The CMU Statistical Transfer Framework (Stat-XFER) is a general framework for developing search-based syntax-driven machine translation (MT) systems. The framework consists of an underlying syntaxbased transfer formalism along with a collection of software components designed to facilitate the development of a broad range of MT research systems. The main components are a general language-independent runtime transfer engine and decoder, along with several different tools for creating the various underlying language-pair-specific resources that are required for building a specific MT system for any given language pair. We describe the general framework, its unique properties and features, and its application to the construction of MT research prototype systems for a diverse collection of language pairs.