Current re-ranking algorithms for machine translation rely on log-linear models, which have the potential problem of underfitting the training data. We present BoostedMERT, a novel boosting algorithm that uses Minimum Error Rate Training (MERT) as a weak learner and builds a re-ranker far more expressive than log-linear models. BoostedMERT is easy to implement, inherits the efficient optimization properties of MERT, and can quickly boost the BLEU score on N-best re-ranking tasks.
