In this paper, we present a block-based model for statistical machine translation. A block is a pair of phrases which are translations of each other. For example, Fig. 1 shows an Arabic-English translation example that uses blocks. During decoding, we view translation as a block segmentation process, where the input sentence is segmented from left to right and the target sentence is generated from bottom to top, one block at a time. A monotone block sequence is generated except for the possibility to swap a pair of neighbor blocks. We use an orientation model similar to the lexicalized block.
