MATREX: DCU machine translation system for IWSLT 2006

In this paper, we give a description of the machine translation system developed at DCU that was used for our first participation in the evaluation campaign of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (2006). This system combines two types of approaches. First, we use an EBMT approach to collect aligned chunks based on two steps: deterministic chunking of both sides and chunk alignment. We use several chunking and alignment strategies. We also extract SMT-style aligned phrases, and the two types of resources are combined. We participated in the Open Data Track for the following translation directions: Arabic-English and Italian-English, for which we translated both the single-best ASR hypotheses and the text input. We report the results of the system for the provided evaluation sets