In the lab meeting tomorrow, February 26, Maryam will talk about her ongoing work into left-to-right decoding. A short description is attached below.
Left-to-right (LR) decoding is a promising decoding algorithm for hierarchical phrase-based translation (Hiero). It generates the target sentence by extending the hypotheses only on the right edge. LR decoding has complexity O(n^2 b) for input of n words and beam size b, compared to O(n^3) for the CKY algorithm. It requires a single language model (LM) history for each target hypothesis rather than two LM histories per hypothesis as in CKY. I will talk about an augmented LR decoding algorithm that builds on the original algorithm in Watanabe et al.,2006 . This new LR decoding algorithm uses cube pruning and provides demonstrably more efficient decoding than CKY Hiero, four times faster; and by introducing new distortion and reordering features for LR decoding, it maintains the same translation quality (as in BLEU scores) obtained phrase-based and CKY Hiero with the same translation model. At the end I will discuss some reordering issues in LR-decoding and possible solutions for that.
