Converting Continuous-Space Language Models into N-gram Language Models with Efficient Bilingual Pruning for Statistical Machine Translation

The Language Model (LM) is an essential component of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). In this article, we focus on developing efficient methods for LM construction. Our main contribution is that we propose a Natural N-grams based Converting (NNGC) method for transforming a Continuous-Space Language Model (CSLM) to a Back-off N-gram Language Model (BNLM). Furthermore, a Bilingual LM Pruning (BLMP) approach is developed for enhancing LMs in SMT decoding and speeding up CSLM converting. The proposed pruning and converting methods can convert a large LM efficiently by working jointly. That is, a LM can be effectively pruned before it is converted from CSLM without sacrificing performance, and further improved if an additional corpus contains out-of-domain information. For different SMT tasks, our experimental results indicate that the proposed NNGC and BLMP methods outperform the existing counterpart approaches significantly in BLEU and computational cost.