A fixed-point decoding approach for statistical machine translation on mobile terminals

The demand for statistical machine translation on mobile terminals is increasing rapidly, but translation speed is restricted by the embedded processors without a floating-point unit. This paper proposes an approach to convert floating-point numbers into fixed-point numbers for SMT decoding on mobile terminals in order to reduce the impact of the processors without a floating-point unit on translation speed. The experiments based on PC and mobile terminal show that this approach ensures the quality of translation and the speed of fixed-point arithmetic operations is 135.6% faster than that of floating-point arithmetic operations. Therefore, this approach can efficiently improve translation speed of SMT systems on mobile terminals with weak ability in floating-point arithmetic operations.