Further Experiments with Shallow Hybrid MT Systems

We describe our hybrid machine translation system which has been developed for and used in the WMT10 shared task. We compute translations from a rulebased MT system and combine the resulting translation “templates” with partial phrases from a state-of-the-art phrasebased, statistical MT engine. Phrase substitution is guided by several decision factors, a continuation of previous work within our group. For the shared task, we have computed translations for six language pairs including English, German, French and Spanish. Our experiments have shown that our shallow substitution approach can effectively improve the translation result from the RBMT system; however it has also become clear that a deeper integration is needed to further improve translation quality.