A phrase-based unigram model for statistical machine translation

In this paper, we describe a phrase-based unigram model for statistical machine translation that uses a much simpler set of model parameters than similar phrase-based models. The units of translation are blocks - pairs of phrases. During decoding, we use a block unigram model and a word-based trigram language model. During training, the blocks are learned from source interval projections using an underlying word alignment. We show experimental results on block selection criteria based on unigram counts and phrase length.