We describe a corpus for target-contextualized machine translation (MT), where the task is to improve the translation of source documents using language models built over presumably related documents in the target language. The idea presumes a situation where most of the information about a topic is in a foreign language, yet some related target-language information is known to exist. Our corpus comprises a set of curated English Wikipedia articles describing news events, along with (i) their Spanish counterparts and (ii) some of the Spanish source articles cited within them. In experiments, we translated these Spanish documents, treating the English articles as target-side context, and evaluate the effect on translation quality when including target-side language models built over this English context and interpolated with other, separately-derived language model data. We find that even under this simplistic baseline approach, we achieve significant improvements as measured by BLEU score.

This paper describes the MIT-LL/AFRL statistical MT system and the improvements that were developed during the IWSLT 2012 evaluation campaign. As part of these efforts, we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance on the Arabic to English and English to French TED-talk translation task. We also applied our existing ASR system to the TED-talk lecture ASR task, and combined our ASR and MT systems for the TED-talk SLT task. We discuss the architecture of the MIT-LL/AFRL MT system, improvements over our 2011 system, and experiments we ran during the IWSLT-2012 evaluation. Specifically, we focus on 1) cross-domain translation using MAP adaptation, 2) cross-entropy filtering of MT training data, and 3) improved Arabic morphology for MT preprocessing.

This paper describes the MIT-LL/AFRL statistical MT system and the improvements that were developed during the IWSLT 2011 evaluation campaign. As part of these efforts, we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance on the Arabic to English and English to French TED-talk translation tasks. We also applied our existing ASR system to the TED-talk lecture ASR task. We discuss the architecture of the MIT-LL/AFRL MT system, improvements over our 2010 system, and experiments we ran during the IWSLT-2011 evaluation. Specifically, we focus on 1) speech recognition for lecture-like data, 2) cross-domain translation using MAP adaptation, and 3) improved Arabic morphology for MT preprocessing.