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<Paper uid="W01-1408">
  <Title>An Efficient A* Search Algorithm for Statistical Machine Translation</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we describe an efficient A* search algorithm for statistical machine translation. In contrary to beam-search or greedy approaches it is possible to guarantee the avoidance of search errors with A*. We develop various sophisticated admissible and almost admissible heuristic functions. Especially our newly developped method to perform a multi-pass A* search with an iteratively improved heuristic function allows us to translate even long sentences. We compare the A* search algorithm with a beam-search approach on the Hansards task.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>