Syntactic Structure and Statistical Machine Translation

Given that statistical methods have revolutionized both natural language parsing and machine translation, it may seem surprising that most current statistically-based translation systems make no use of syntactic structure. I will describe work on models of translation that aim fill this gap, presenting results for models that make use of syntactic information provided for one or languages, as well as models that infer structure directly from parallel bilingual text. I will also describe the use of syntactic information for the automatic evaluation of machine-produced translations.