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Source-Side Left-to-Right or Target-Side Left-to-Right? An Empirical Comparison of Two Phrase-Based Decoding Algorithms

Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 1496–1500

Abstract

This paper describes an empirical study of the phrase-based decoding algorithm proposed by Chang and Collins (2017). The algorithm produces a translation by processing the source-language sentence in strictly left-to-right order, differing from commonly used approaches that build the target-language sentence in left-to-right order. Our results show that the new algorithm is competitive with Moses (Koehn et al., 2007) in terms of both speed and BLEU scores.