QCRI at IWSLT 2013: Experiments in Arabic-English and English-Arabic Spoken Language Translation
Hassan Sajjad, Francisco Guzmán, Preslav Nakov, Ahmed Abdelalí, Kenton Murray, Fahad Al-Obaidli, Stephan Vogel · 2013
We describe the Arabic-English and English-Arabic statis-tical machine translation systems developed by the Qatar Computing Research Institute for the IWSLT’2013 evalua-tion campaign on spoken language translation. We used one phrase-based and two hierarchical decoders, exploring var-ious settings thereof. We further experimented with three domain adaptation methods, and with various Arabic word segmentation schemes. Combining the output of several systems yielded a gain of up to 3.4 BLEU points over the baseline. Here we also describe a specialized normalization scheme for evaluating Arabic output, which was adopted for the IWSLT’2013 evaluation campaign. 1.