This paper presents an extension of Chiang’s hierarchical phrase-based (HPB) model, called Head-Driven HPB (HD-HPB), which incorporates head information in translation rules to better capture syntax-driven information, as well as improved reordering between any two neighboring non-terminals at any stage of a derivation to explore a larger reordering search space. Experiments on Chinese-English translation on four NIST MT test sets show that the HD-HPB model significantly outperforms Chiang’s model with average gains of points absolute in BLEU
