NiuTrans: An Open Source Toolkit for Phrase-based and Syntax-based Machine Translation

We present a new open source toolkit for phrase-based and syntax-based machine translation. The toolkit supports several state-of-the-art models developed in statistical machine translation, including the phrase-based model, the hierachical phrase-based model, and various syntaxbased models. The key innovation provided by the toolkit is that the decoder can work with various grammars and offers different choices of decoding algrithms, such as phrase-based decoding, decoding as parsing/tree-parsing and forest-based decoding. Moreover, several useful utilities were distributed with the toolkit, including a discriminative reordering model, a simple and fast language model, and an implementation of minimum error rate training for weight tuning.