EU-BRIDGE MT: Combined machine translation

Abstract

This paper describes one of the collaborative efforts within EU-BRIDGE to further advance the state of the art in machine translation between two European language pairs, German!English and English!German. Three research institutes involved in the EU-BRIDGE project combined their individual machine translation systems and participated with a joint setup in the shared translation task of the evaluation campaign at the ACL 2014 Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT 2014). We combined up to nine different machine translation engines via system combination. RWTH Aachen University, the University of Edinburgh, and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology developed several individual systems which serve as system combination input. We devoted special attention to building syntax-based systems and combining them with the phrasebased ones. The joint setups yield empirical gains of up to 1.6 points in BLEU and 1.0 points in TER on the WMT newstest2013 test set compared to the best single systems.