IBM Statistical Machine Translation for Spoken Languages

We discuss performance enhancing techniques we have developed for the IWSLT 2005 Evaluation Campaign: (i) a phrase acquisition technique which expands the phrase boundaries to include target words aligned to null source words in a principled manner, and (ii) a system combination technique which selects the minimum cost translation output out of many translation outputs of the same input segment produced by various systems using different phrase translation lexicons. We also discuss I B M system performances in the Arabic to English and Chinese to English translation evaluations of the I W S L T 2005 evaluation campaign.