Exploiting alignment techniques in MATREX: the DCU machine translation system for IWSLT 2008.

Yanjun Ma, John Tinsley, Hany Hassan, Jinhua Du, Andy Way


Abstract
In this paper, we give a description of the machine translation (MT) system developed at DCU that was used for our third participation in the evaluation campaign of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2008). In this participation, we focus on various techniques for word and phrase alignment to improve system quality. Specifically, we try out our word packing and syntax-enhanced word alignment techniques for the Chinese–English task and for the English–Chinese task for the first time. For all translation tasks except Arabic–English, we exploit linguistically motivated bilingual phrase pairs extracted from parallel treebanks. We smooth our translation tables with out-of-domain word translations for the Arabic–English and Chinese–English tasks in order to solve the problem of the high number of out of vocabulary items. We also carried out experiments combining both in-domain and out-of-domain data to improve system performance and, finally, we deploy a majority voting procedure combining a language model-based method and a translation-based method for case and punctuation restoration. We participated in all the translation tasks and translated both the single-best ASR hypotheses and the correct recognition results. The translation results confirm that our new word and phrase alignment techniques are often helpful in improving translation quality, and the data combination method we proposed can significantly improve system performance.
Anthology ID:
2008.iwslt-evaluation.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign
Month:
October 20-21
Year:
2008
Address:
Waikiki, Hawaii
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
Note:
Pages:
26–33
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2008.iwslt-evaluation.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yanjun Ma, John Tinsley, Hany Hassan, Jinhua Du, and Andy Way. 2008. Exploiting alignment techniques in MATREX: the DCU machine translation system for IWSLT 2008.. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign, pages 26–33, Waikiki, Hawaii.
Cite (Informal):
Exploiting alignment techniques in MATREX: the DCU machine translation system for IWSLT 2008. (Ma et al., IWSLT 2008)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2008.iwslt-evaluation.3.pdf