1. A computer-implemented method for statistical machine translation (MT) weight tuning, the method comprising: executing instructions stored in memory by a processor to: sample a pair of candidate translation units from a set of candidate translation units corresponding to a source unit, each candidate translation unit corresponding to unique numeric values assigned to one or more features; receive an initial weighting value for each feature; compare the pair of candidate translation units to produce a binary result; and use the binary result to adjust the initial weighting values to produce modified weighting values using the processor.