Source-Side Left-to-Right or Target-Side Left-to-Right? An Empirical Comparison of Two Phrase-Based Decoding Algorithms

AbstractThis paper describes an empirical study of the phrase-based decoding algorithm proposed by Chang and Collins (2017). The algorithm produces a translation by processing the source-language sentence in strictly left-to-right order, differing from commonly used approaches that build the target-language sentence in left-to-right order. Our results show that the new algorithm is competitive with Moses (Koehn et al., 2007) in terms of both speed and BLEU scores.