Abstract: The discontinuous phrases are seldom taken into account in present phrase-based statistical machine translalion models,which leads to the distortion or omission of translation results. This paper took discontinuous preposition phrases for example and proposed a phrase template extraction algorithm. It first extracted phrase templates from chinese corpus based on some specified rules, and then got their english translations with a bilingual alignment corpus and a preposition and location-word translation table. The generated bilingual templates were then added into the translation table. Comparative experiments in standard test corpus indicate that when these discontinuous phrase templates arc applied in the translation system, the resulted translations are well comply with grammar specifications, and the translation quality is also improved.

Key words: Statistical machine translation,Phrase template,Discontinuous preposition phrases,Template extraction