Hybridity in MT

(Way & Gough, 2005) demonstrate that their Marker-based EBMT system is capable of outperforming a word-based SMT system trained on reasonably large data sets. (Groves & Way, 2005) take this a stage further and demonstrate that while the EBMT system also outperforms a phrase-based SMT (PBSMT) system, a hybrid ‘example-based SMT’ system incorporating marker chunks and SMT sub-sentential alignments is capable of outperforming both baseline translation models for French–English translation. In this paper, we show that similar gains are to be had from constructing a hybrid ‘statistical EBMT’ system capable of outperforming the baseline system of (Way & Gough, 2005). Using the Europarl (Koehn, 2005) training and test sets we show that this time around, although all ‘hybrid’ variants of the EBMT system fall short of the quality achieved by the baseline PBSMT system, merging elements of the marker-based and SMT data, as in (Groves & Way, 2005), to create a hybrid ‘example-based SMT’ system, outperforms the baseline SMT and EBMT systems from which it is derived. Furthermore, we provide further evidence in favour of hybrid systems by adding an SMT target language model to all EBMT system variants and demonstrate that this too has a positive effect on transla-