MaTrEx: the DCU Machine Translation System for IWSLT 2007
Hany Hassan, Yanjun Ma, Andy Way · Arrow@dit (Dublin Institute of Technology) · 2006
In this paper, we give a description of the machine translation system devel-oped at DCU that was used for our sec-ond participation in the evaluation cam-paign of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2007). In this participation, we focus on some new methods to improve sys-tem quality. Specifically, we try our word packing technique for different language pairs, we smooth our translation tables with out-of-domain word translations for the Arabic–English and Chinese–English tasks in order to solve the high number of out of vocabulary items, and finally we deploy a translation-based model for case and punctuation restoration. We participated in both the classical and challenge tasks for the following translation directions: Chinese–English, Japanese–English and Arabic–English. For the last two tasks, we translated both the single-best ASR hypotheses and the correct recognition results; for Chinese– English, we just translated the correct recognition results. We report the results of the system for the provided evaluation sets, together with some additional ex-periments carried out following identifi-cation of some simple tokenisation errors in the official runs. 1