This paper presents a Function Word centered, Syntax-based (FWS) solution to address phrase ordering in the context of statistical machine translation (SMT). Motivated by the observation that function words often encode grammatical relationship among phrases within a sentence, we propose a probabilistic synchronous grammar to model the ordering of function words and their left and right arguments. We improve phrase ordering performance by lexicalizing the resulting rules in a small number of cases corresponding to function words. .
