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A Systematic Comparison of Phrase Table Pruning Techniques

Peng Xu
Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning, Association for Computational Linguistics, Jeju Island, Korea, pp. 972-983

Abstract

When trained on very large parallel corpora, the phrase table component of a machine translation system grows to consume vast computational resources. In this paper, we introduce a novel pruning criterion that places phrase table pruning on a sound theoretical foundation. Systematic experiments on four language pairs under various data conditions show that our principled approach is superior to existing ad hoc pruning methods.

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