Joshua 6 released

[Matt Post]

Joshua 6 has been released:

http://joshua-decoder.org

(just minutes before an entirely independent release of Moses, in fact).

The main changes, from the developer perspective, are:

- There is now an unlexicalized, phrase-based decoder in Joshua. The nice thing is that the decoder uses the same hypergraph format: phrases are just left-branching Hiero rules, and the stack-based decoding algorithm produces a hypergraph that can be manipulated in the same ways as the hierarchical hypergraph. The phrase-based decoder is faster than the (then-current) Moses 2.1.1 release, and nearly as fast as the current Moses (note the log scale):

- Feature functions are now loaded by reflection. Creating a new feature function requires only creating a single file inheriting from FeatureFunction.java (or one of its subclasses). No stub code need be entered separately to help load it.

- The hierarchical decoder is significantly faster than the old version (speed comparison forthcoming).

matt