Grammatical Inference for Syntax-Based Statistical Machine Translation

In this article we present a syntax-based translation system, called TABL (Translation using Alignment-Based Learning). It translates natural language sentences by mapping grammar rules (which are induced by the Alignment-Based Learning grammatical inference framework) of the source language to those of the target language. By parsing a sentence in the source language, the grammar rules in the derivation are translated using the mapping and subsequently, a derivation in the target language is generated. The initial results are encouraging, illustrating that this is a valid machine translation approach.