Patent ID: 8788258

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a source phrase in a source language; classifying the source phrase into a phrase meaning; matching the phrase meaning to a target phrase automaton in a target language, the target phrase automaton comprising a plurality of states and a plurality of arcs interconnecting the plurality of states to define a sentence path, each of the plurality of states defining a word position slot for inserting a word from a bag of words, and each of the plurality of arcs associated with a pre-defined insertion cost for inserting the word from the bag of words based on a previous state in the sentence path, wherein the predefined insertion cost has one of a positive and negative value which is associated with one of penalizing and rewarding the sentence path based on how many words are in the sentence path in order to produce more words in a target sentence relative to the source phrase; determining, for each word position slot in each target phrase automaton, a target word possibility from the bag of words associated with the word position slot based on at least one of a lexical translation of words in the source phrase and a phrase-to-phrase mapping; calculating a target sentence probability for the sentence path based at least on the pre-defined insertion cost associated with each of the plurality of arcs for the sentence path; and upon determining that the sentence path has a probability above a threshold, constructing the target sentence using the sentence path.