EU-BRIDGE MT: Text Translation of Talks in the EU-BRIDGE Project ∗Markus Freitag, ∗Stephan Peitz, ∗Joern Wuebker, ∗Hermann Ney,

EU-BRIDGE1 is a European research project which is aimed at developing innovative speech translation technology. This paper describes one of the collaborative efforts within EU-BRIDGE to further advance the state of the art in ma-chine translation between two European language pairs, English→French and German→English. Four research insti-tutions involved in the EU-BRIDGE project combined their individual machine translation systems and participated with a joint setup in the machine translation track of the evalua-tion campaign at the 2013 International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT). We present the methods and techniques to achieve high translation quality for text translation of talks which are ap-plied at RWTH Aachen University, the University of Edin-burgh, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and Fondazione Bruno Kessler. We then show how we have been able to considerably boost translation performance (as measured in terms of the metrics BLEU and TER) by means of system combination. The joint setups yield empirical gains of up to 1.4 points in BLEU and 2.8 points in TER on the IWSLT test sets compared to the best single systems