The impact of parsing accuracy on syntax-based SMT

In statistical machine translation (SMT), syntax-based models generally rely on the syntactic information provided by syntactic parsers in source language, target language or both of them. However, whether or how parsers impact the performance of syntax-based systems is still an open issue in the MT field. In this paper, we make an attempt to explore answers to this issue, and empirically investigate the impact of parsing accuracy on MT performance in a state-of-the-art syntax-based system. Our study shows that syntax-based system is not very sensitive to the parsing accuracy of parsers used in building MT systems.