Two Word Reordering Strategies in English - to - Chinese Translation

In English-to-Chinese machine translation, reordering mistakes are frequently caused by miss-located prepositional phrases(PP). In English, a PP is often located after its attached host, while in Chinese things are the opposite. Recent phrase-based MT approaches tend to ignore such syntax information. In our work, we propose two strategies to resolve the above problem: first, for MT that adopts the lexical reordering model, we modify the reordering orientations from Monotone-Swap-Discontinuous (MSD) to MonotoneLeftDiscontinuous-RightDiscontinuous (MLR), which is more efficient in guiding the reordering direction of PP; second, for MT using the pre-reordering approach, we apply PP attachment disambiguation to find the host of each PP and then pre-reorder them precisely. The superiority of the two approaches is verified in our empirical studies. Our work has already been applied in Youdao online translation system (http://fanyi.youdao.com).