Patent ID: 7983898

Claim:
A method of estimating phrase translation probabilities for use in a machine translation system, the method being implemented on a computer with a processor, the method comprising: selecting, with a processor, an instance of a possible phrase translation pair, from a set of possible phrase translation pair instances occurring in a sentence translation pair in a corpus of sentence translation pairs stored on a data store, the possible phrase translation pair instance having an instance of a first phrase in a first language and an instance of a second phrase in a second language, the first and second phrases being possible translations of one another; estimating, with the processor, an alignment probability that the first phrase instance and the second phrase instance are aligned to each other in the sentence translation pair, not excluding the possibility that another phrase instance in the first language, overlapping the first phrase instance in the first language, and another phrase instance in the second language are also aligned to each other in the sentence translation pair wherein estimating an alignment probability comprises: generating a first selection probability indicative of how likely the second phrase instance will be selected as a translation of the first phrase instance given the set of instances of possible phrase translation pairs occurring in the given sentence translation pair; generating a second selection probability indicative of how likely the first phrase instance will be selected as a translation of the second phrase instance given the set of instances of possible phrase translation pairs; and estimating the alignment probability for the selected possible phrase translation pair instance, based on the first and second selection probabilities; estimating, with the processor, a phrase translation probability for the selected possible phrase translation pair, over the corpus of sentence translation pairs, based on the sum of the alignment probabilities for all instances of the possible phrase translation pair in the corpus of sentence translation pairs; iterating, with the processor, over selecting possible phrase translation pair instances, estimating alignment probabilities, and estimating phrase translation probabilities until a desired stopping criteria is met.