Unsupervised Word Alignment by Agreement Under ITG Constraint

Hidetaka Kamigaito1, Akihiro Tamura2, Hiroya Takamura1, Manabu Okumura1, Eiichiro Sumita3
1Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, 3National Institute of Information and Communication Technology


Abstract

We propose a novel unsupervised word alignment method that uses a constraint based on Inversion Transduction Grammar (ITG) parse trees to jointly unify two directional models. Previous agreement methods are not helpful for locating alignments with long distances because they do not use any syntactic structures. In contrast, the proposed method symmetrizes alignments in consideration of their structural coherence by using the ITG constraint softly in the posterior regularization framework (Ganchev et al., 2010). The ITG constraint is also compatible with word alignments that are not covered by ITG parse trees. Hence, the proposed method is robust to ITG parse errors compared to other alignment methods that directly use an ITG model. Compared to the baseline agreement method (Ganchev et al., 2010), the experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves alignment performance regarding Japanese-English KFTT and BTEC corpus, and machine translation performance on the Japanese-English IWSLT 2007 corpus.