This paper presents a detailed study of a method for morphology generalization and generation to address out-of-domain translations in English-to-Spanish phrase-based MT. The paper studies whether the morphological richness of the target language causes poor quality translation when translating out-of-domain. In detail, this approach first translates into Spanish simplified forms and then predicts the final inflected forms through a morphology generation step based on shallow and deep-projected linguistic information available from both the source and target-language sentences. Obtained results highlight the importance of generalization, and therefore generation, for dealing with out-of-domain data.

This paper gives a description of the statistical machine translation (SMT) systems developed at the TALP Research Center of the UPC (Universitat Polite`cnica de Catalunya) for our participation in the IWSLT’08 evaluation campaign. We present Ngram-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 reordering 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.