The LIG Arabic/English speech translation system at IWSLT08

This paper is a description of the system presented by the LIG laboratory to the IWSLT08 speech translation evaluation. The LIG participated, for the second time this year, in the Arabic to English speech translation task. For translation, we used a conventional statistical phrase-based system developed using the moses open source decoder. We describe chronologically the improvements made since last year, starting from the IWSLT 2007 system, following with the improvements made for our 2008 submission. Then, we discuss in section 5 some post-evaluation experiments made very recently, as well as some on-going work on Arabic / English speech to text translation. This year, the systems were ranked according to the (BLEU+METEOR)/2 score of the primary ASR output run submissions. The LIG was ranked 5/10 based on this rule.