The Complexity of Phrase Alignment Problems

Many phrase alignment models operate over the combinatorial space of bijective phrase alignments. We prove that finding an optimal alignment in this space is NP-hard, while computing alignment expectations is #P-hard. On the other hand, we show that the problem of finding an optimal alignment can be cast as an integer linear program, which provides a simple, declarative approach to Viterbi inference for phrase alignment models that is empirically quite efficient.