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SMT

Building a simple SMT

I had couple of vacation days last week.   For fun, I decided to train a statistical machine translator (SMT).   Since I want to use tools from open source.  The natural choice is Moses w GIZA++.  So this note is how you can start smoothly.  I don’t plan to write a detail tutorial because Moses’ tutorial is nice enough already.  What I note here is more on how you should deal with different stumbling blocks.

Which Tutorial to Follow?

If you never run an SMT training before,  perhaps the more solid way to start is to follow the “Baseline System” link (a better name could be “How to train a baseline system”).    At here, there is a rather detail tutorial on how to train a sets of models from WMT13 mini news commentary.

Compilation

I found that the most difficult part of the process is to compile moses.   I don’t blame anybody, C++ program can generally be difficult to compile.

Boost

Use source of boost, make sure libbz2 was first installed.  Then life would be much easier.

cmph

While it is not mandatory, I would highly recommend you to install cmph first before compiling moses because compiling cmph would trigger compilation of file compressing tools such as processPhraseTableMin and processLexicalTableMin.  Without them, it will take a long long time to do decoding.

Actual bjaming

Do ./bjam –with-boost=<boost_dir> –with-cmph=<cmph_dir> -j 4

works fairly well for me until I tried to compile the ./misc directory.   That I found I need to manually add a path of boost to the compilation.

Training

Training is fairly trivial once you have moses compiled correctly and put everything in your root directory.

On the hand, if you compiled your code somewhere other than ~/, do expect some debugging is necessary.  e.g. mert-moses.pl would require full path at the –merdir argument.

Results:

BLEU = 23.34, 60.1/29.7/16.7/9.9 (BP=1.000, ratio=1.018, hyp_len=76112, ref_len=7475)

Conclusion

Here you have it.  Some notes on the simplest recipe for non-expert (like me).   If I have a chance, I would analyze how the source code works.  Again just for fun.

Arthur

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