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# Phrase-Based and Deep Syntactic English-to-Czech Statistical Machine Translation

**Authors:** [Ondřej Bojar](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/ondrej-bojar/), [Jan Hajič](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/jan-hajic/) · **Year:** 2008 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W08-0319](https://aclanthology.org/W08-0319/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only

[**28** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2139456735) openalex · 2026-10-19[**9** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/bojar-2008-phrase-based-deep-syntactic-english/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W08-03/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W08-0319/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W08-0319.pdf)
- [DOI 10.3115/1626394.1626413](https://doi.org/10.3115/1626394.1626413)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2139456735)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Ondřej Bojar](https://openalex.org/A5077746237) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0606-0050) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/143832874) · h 38 · 13669 citations · 364 works
2. [Jan Hajič](https://openalex.org/A5005276940) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9207-567X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/144002335) · h 8 · 342 citations · 55 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-19); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper reports two English-to-Czech systems for WMT 2008. The first is a factored phrase-based system in Moses. Its target side is generated in two steps: word forms first, then full morphological tags, with six language models, including 7-gram models over tags. It is the stronger system, at 16.4 BLEU on the WMT08 news-commentary test. The second is a probabilistic tree transfer at the deep syntactic (t-) layer, which uses synchronous treelet grammars and a binode model of governor and child. Its node labels have more than 20 attributes, and the transfer maps them as factors. It reaches only about 4.9 BLEU on the same test. The authors list the causes: errors add up over analysis steps, parses of the two languages do not match and lose data at alignment, the target attributes multiply the search space, and the deterministic generation has no n-gram model to rescore with.

## Ideas

- I1. Fill the fine attributes last: the explosion comes from producing all attributes during search. In the translator, let the encoder fix structure and lexical choice first, and write the function-word and feature values (open problems 4 and 5) only once those are set, as the paper recommends.
- I2. Two-step target generation: first the concept and its chunk, then the grammatical features from UD FEATS, as the two-step scheme of the paper. Measure the residual bits of each step on the Bible pairs in `tools/translate/src/profile.rs`.
- I3. A count-based binode score: estimate p(child | governor) on the target trees, and use it as one more ranking term in the encoder, with the counts in BTreeMap. The paper's gain is in the same direction as its own explanation, so the control is the encoder without the term.
- I4. Measure the parse-loss cost: the paper says parsing both sides on its own loses many pairs. Count, for KJV and WEB verses, the share of meta tokens that have no partner after the reader, and report it per author pair (open problem 1).

## For Mova

The code is `tools/translate/src/profile.rs` and `tools/translate/src/meta.rs`. The paper's search over treelets is not for Mova, but its lesson about attribute explosion is. The table-based two-step generation fits the count-based encoder. Report exact match as well as BLEU, since the paper's BLEU gap is large and its causes are structural.

Topics: [Machine translation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/machine-translation/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.3115/1626394.1626413](https://doi.org/10.3115/1626394.1626413)

```
@inproceedings{bojar2008phrase,
  title = {{Phrase-Based and Deep Syntactic English-to-Czech Statistical Machine Translation}},
  author = {Bojar, Ondřej and Hajič, Jan},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation},
  year = {2008},
  doi = {10.3115/1626394.1626413},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1626394.1626413}
}
```

- [← previous Implementation and Conversational Environment of ARIANE 78.4, An Integrated System for Automated Translation and Human Revision](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/boitet-1982-implementation-conversational-environment-ariane-78/)
- [next → Rule-Based Normalization of Historical Texts](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/bollmann-2011-rule-based-normalization-historical-texts/)
- [↑ back to Machine translation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/mtrans/)

## References

25 references, 5 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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