A word alignment model based on multiobjective evolutionary algorithms

Word alignment is a key task in statistical machine translation (SMT). This paper presents a novel model for this task. In this model, word alignment is considered as amultiobjective optimization problem and solved based on the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II), which is one of the best multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEA). There are two advantages of the proposed model based on NSGA-II. First, it could be easily extended through incorporating new objective functions. Secondly, it does not need any hand-aligned word-level alignment data to determine the weight of each objective function. Experiments were carried out and the results show that the proposed model outperforms the IBM translation models significantly. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.