Preordering for Chinese-Vietnamese statistical machine translation

Word order is one of the most significant differences between the Chinese and Vietnamese. In the phrase-based statistical machine translation, the reordering model will learn reordering rules from bilingual corpora. If the bilingual corpora are large and good enough, the reordering rules are exact and coverable. However, Chinese-Vietnamese is a low-resource language pair, the extraction of reordering rules is limited. This leads to the quality of reordering in Chinese-Vietnamese machine translation is not high. In this paper, we have combined Chinese dependency relation and Chinese-Vietnamese word alignment results in order to pre-order Chinese word order to be suitable to Vietnamese one. The experimental results show that our methodology has improved the machine translation performance compared to the translation system using only the reordering models of phrase-based statistical machine translation.