An empirical study on computing consensus translations from multiple machine translation systems

This paper presents an empirical study on how different selections of input translation systems affect translation quality in system combination. We give empirical evidence that the systems to be combined should be of similar quality and need to be almost uncorrelated in order to be beneficial for system combination. Experimental results are presented for composite translations computed from large numbers of different research systems as well as a set of translation systems derived from one of the bestranked machine translation engines in the 2006 NIST machine translation evaluation.