Relevance of different segmentation options on Spanish-Basque SMT

Segmentation is widely used in adapting Statistical Machine Translation to highly inflected languages as Basque. The way this segmentation is carried out impacts on the quality of the translation. In or-der to look for the most adequate segmen-tation for a Spanish-Basque system, we have tried different segmentation options and analyzed their effects on the transla-tion quality. Although all segmentation options used in this work are based on the same morpho-logical analysis, translation quality varies significantly depending on the segmen-tation criteria used. Most of the seg-mentation options outperform the base-line according to all metrics, except the one which splits words according the mor-pheme boundaries. From here we can con-clude the importance of the development of the segmentation criteria in SMT.