Translation as weighted deduction

Abstract

We present a unified view of many translation algorithms that synthesizes work on deductive parsing, semiring parsing, and efficient approximate search algorithms. This gives rise to clean analyses and compact descriptions that can serve as the basis for modular implementations. We illustrate this with several examples, showing how to build search spaces for several disparate phrase-based search strategies, integrate non-local features, and devise novel models. Although the framework is drawn from parsing and applied to translation, it is applicable to many dynamic programming problems arising in natural language processing and other areas.