The TALP&I2r SMT systems for IWSLT 2008

This paper gives a description of the statistical machine translation (SMT) systems developed at the TALP Research Center of the UPC (Universitat Politde Catalunya) for our participation in the IWSLT'08 evaluation campaign. We present N gram-based (TALPtuples) and phrase-based (TALPphrases) SMT systems. The paper explains the 2008 systems' architecture and outlines translation schemes we have used, mainly focusing on the new techniques that are challenged to improve speech-to-speech translation quality. The novelties we have introduced are: improved reorder- ing method, linear combination of translation and reordering models and new technique dealing with punctuation marks insertion for a phrase-based SMT system. This year we focus on the Arabic-English, Chinese- Spanish and pivot Chinese-(English)-Spanish translation tasks.

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