Word reordering is a difficult task for decoders when the languages involved have a significant difference in syntax. Phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT), preferred in commercial settings due to its maturity, is particularly prone to errors in long range reordering. Source sentence pre-ordering, as a pre-processing step before PBSMT, proved to be an efficient solution that can be achieved using limited resources. We propose a dependency-based pre-ordering model with parameters optimized using a reordering score to pre-order the source sentence. The source sentence is then translated using an existing phrase-based system. The proposed solution is very simple to implement. It uses a hierarchical phrase-based statistical machine translation system (HPBSMT) for pre-ordering, combined with a PBSMT system for the actual translation. We show that the system can provide alternate translations of less post-editing effort in a translation workflow with German as the source language.

Human translators are the key to evaluating machine translation (MT) quality and also to addressing the so far unanswered question when and how to use MT in professional translation workflows. This paper describes the corpus developed as a result of a detailed large scale human evaluation consisting of three tightly connected tasks: ranking, error classification and post-editing.

We describe DFKI’s submission to the System Combination and Machine Translation tracks of the 2011 IWSLT Evaluation Campaign. We focus on a sentence selection mechanism which chooses the (hopefully) best sentence among a set of candidates. The rationale behind it is to take advantage of the strengths of each system, especially given an heterogeneous dataset like the one in this evaluation campaign, composed of TED Talks of very different topics. We focus on using features that correlate well with human judgement and, while our primary system still focus on optimizing the BLEU score on the development set, our goal is to move towards optimizing directly the correlation with human judgement. This kind of system is still under development and was used as a secondary submission.