Context Sensitive Word Deletion Model for Statistical Machine Translation

Word deletion (WD) errors can lead to poor comprehension of the meaning of source translated sentences in phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT), and have a critical impact on the adequacy of the translation results generated by SMT systems. In this paper, first we classify the word deletion into two categories, wanted and unwanted word deletions. For these two kinds of word deletions, we propose a maximum entropy based word deletion model to improve the translation quality in phrase-based SMT. Our proposed model are based on features automatically learned from a real-word bitext. In our experiments on Chinese-to-English news and web translation tasks, the results show that our approach is capable of generating more adequate translations compared with the baseline system, and our proposed word deletion model yields a +0.99 BLEU improvement and a -2.20 TER reduction on the NIST machine translation evaluation corpora.