  In this paper, we propose a bidimensional attention based recursive
autoencoder (BattRAE) to integrate clues and sourcetarget interactions at
multiple levels of granularity into bilingual phrase representations. We employ
recursive autoencoders to generate tree structures of phrases with embeddings
at different levels of granularity (e.g., words, sub-phrases and phrases). Over
these embeddings on the source and target side, we introduce a bidimensional
attention network to learn their interactions encoded in a bidimensional
attention matrix, from which we extract two soft attention weight distributions
simultaneously. These weight distributions enable BattRAE to generate
compositive phrase representations via convolution. Based on the learned phrase
representations, we further use a bilinear neural model, trained via a
max-margin method, to measure bilingual semantic similarity. To evaluate the
effectiveness of BattRAE, we incorporate this semantic similarity as an
additional feature into a state-of-the-art SMT system. Extensive experiments on
NIST Chinese-English test sets show that our model achieves a substantial
improvement of up to 1.63 BLEU points on average over the baseline.
