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.

This paper describes the MIT-LL/AFRL statistical MT system and the improvements that were developed during the IWSLT 2009 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 and Turkish to English translation tasks. We discuss the architecture of the MIT-LL/AFRL MT system, improvements over our 2008 system, and experiments we ran during the IWSLT-2009 evaluation. Specifically, we focus on 1) Cross-domain translation using MAP adaptation and unsupervised training, 2) Turkish morphological processing and translation, 3) improved Arabic morphology for MT preprocessing, and 4) system combination methods for machine translation.

This paper describes the MIT-LL/AFRL statistical MT system and the improvements that were developed during the IWSLT 2008 evaluation campaign. As part of these efforts, we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance for both text and speech-based translation on Chinese and Arabic translation tasks. We discuss the architecture of the MIT-LL/AFRL MT system, improvements over our 2007 system, and experiments we ran during the IWSLT-2008 evaluation. Specifically, we focus on 1) novel segmentation models for phrase-based MT, 2) improved lattice and confusion network decoding of speech input, 3) improved Arabic morphology for MT preprocessing, and 4) system combination methods for machine translation.

The MIT-LL/AFRL MT system implements a standard phrase-based, statistical translation model. It incorporates a number of extensions that improve performance for speech-based translation. During this evaluation our efforts focused on the rapid porting of our SMT system to a new language (Arabic) and novel approaches to translation from speech input. This paper discusses the architecture of the MIT-LL/AFRL MT system, improvements over our 2006 system, and experiments we ran during the IWSLT-2007 evaluation. Specifically, we focus on 1) experiments comparing the performance of confusion network decoding and direct lattice decoding techniques for machine translation of speech, 2) the application of lightweight morphology for Arabic MT preprocessing and 3) improved confusion network decoding.