ISCA Archive IWSLT 2009
ISCA Archive IWSLT 2009

The NUS statistical machine translation system for IWSLT 2009

Preslav Nakov, Chang Liu, Wei Lu, Hwee Tou Ng

We describe the system developed by the team of the National University of Singapore for the Chinese-English BTEC task of the IWSLT 2009 evaluation campaign. We adopted a state-of-the-art phrase-based statistical machine translation approach and focused on experiments with different Chinese word segmentation standards. In our official submission, we trained a separate system for each segmenter and we combined the outputs in a subsequent re-ranking step. Given the small size of the training data, we further re-trained the system on the development data after tuning. The evaluation results show that both strategies yield sizeable and consistent improvements in translation quality.