---
title: "Online Large-Margin Training of Syntactic and Structural"
description: "The authors build on the work of Watanabe et al. and propose online large-margin… 44.6 BLEU. 35 references, cited by 133 papers here."
authors: ["David Chiang", "Yuval Marton", "Philip Resnik"]
year: 2008
venue: "Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/D08-1024/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chiang-2008-online-large-margin-training-syntactic/"
---
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# Online Large-Margin Training of Syntactic and Structural Translation Features

**Authors:** [David Chiang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/david-chiang/), [Yuval Marton](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/yuval-marton/) and [Philip Resnik](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/philip-resnik/) · **Year:** 2008 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/emnlp/) ([EMNLP 2008](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/emnlp/2008/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/D08-1024/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/D08-1024.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2111142112)

**Citations:** 237 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [133](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chiang-2008-online-large-margin-training-syntactic/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary

Statistical machine translation systems are usually tuned with MERT. It reliably optimizes only a few dozen feature weights: by informal estimates, between 15 and 30. This makes it hard to add new features to the model. The authors build on the work of Watanabe et al. and propose online large-margin training with the MIRA algorithm in place of MERT. Training is distributed across several processors that exchange updates. The method makes broader use of the decoder's parse forest. The oracle translation is selected as a trade-off between BLEU and the model score. In addition, negative examples are added: translations that the model mistakenly scores too highly. With the same feature set, MIRA is on par with MERT in both quality and computational cost. The method is then applied to the hierarchical phrase-based model Hiero with two groups of features. The first group consists of the soft syntactic constraints of Marton and Resnik, which are now all trained simultaneously. The second is a new structural reordering model that takes constituent length into account. Each group on its own yields a statistically significant gain. Together they have 56 weights and improve the result by 2.6 BLEU on the Arabic-English NIST 2006 data. The work shows that, freed from the limitations of MERT, much richer translation models can be built.

## Key points

- **Task and data:** Arabic-to-English translation, with Hiero as the baseline system. Testing was carried out on a portion of the NIST 2006 set, covering the newswire and newsgroups genres.
- **Results (Table 1):** the baseline system with MERT has 12 features and 44.6 BLEU on the full test set. MIRA with the same features gives 45.3. MIRA with the combination of syntactic and distortion features (56 weights) gives 47.2. On the dev set the result rose from 52.0 to 53.6. MERT was unable to take advantage of the more detailed (fine-grained) features, whereas MIRA was.
- **Method:** the loss function is based on BLEU. BLEU is computed in the context of a pseudo-document, an exponentially weighted moving average of previous translations (coefficient 0.9). The oracle is selected with the parameter µ = 0.5. Negative examples are taken with µ = ∞, i.e., via loss-augmented inference. The regularization parameter is C = 0.01.
- **Ablation (Table 2):** if the additional negative examples are removed, training breaks down: the models generate translations that are too long. When the processors do not exchange updates, the dev result drops from 53.6 to 53.1. Standard local updating gives 0.5 BLEU less than the proposed oracle selection.
- **New features:** the soft syntactic constraints reward or penalize a derivation depending on how well it agrees with the syntactic parse of the source sentence. The structural reordering model addresses a known gap in Hiero: it models how word order depends on constituent length.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [University of Southern California](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-southern-california/) — University, Los Angeles, United States · 162 works · 35,836 citations
- [University of Maryland, College Park](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-maryland-college-park/) — University, College Park, United States · 132 works · 25,380 citations

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🧭 Topics (1): [🔁 Machine translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/machine-translation/) · 1,087 works

## Cite

Cite as: David Chiang, Yuval Marton and Philip Resnik. 2008. Online Large-Margin Training of Syntactic and Structural Translation Features. Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{chiang2008online,
  title = {{Online Large-Margin Training of Syntactic and Structural Translation Features}},
  author = {David Chiang, Yuval Marton and Philip Resnik},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2008},
  doi = {10.3115/1613715.1613747},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1613715.1613747}
}
```

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## References

35 references, 13 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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*Updated 1 November 2026*