Adaptive development data selection for log-linear model in statistical machine translation

This paper addresses the problem of dynamic model parameter selection for log-linear model based statistical machine translation (SMT) systems. In this work, we propose a principled method for this task by transforming it to a test data dependent development set selection problem. We present two algorithms for automatic development set construction, and evaluated our method on several NIST data sets for the Chinese-English translation task. Experimental results show that our method can effectively adapt log-linear model parameters to different test data, and consistently achieves good translation performance compared with conventional methods that use a fixed model parameter setting across different data sets.