LIG English-French spoken language translation system for IWSLT 2011

This paper describes the system developed by the LIG laboratory for the 2011 IWSLT evaluation. We participated to the English-French MT and SLT tasks. The development of a reference translation system (MT task), as well as an ASR output translation system (SLT task) are presented. We focus this year on the SLT task and on the use of multiple 1-best ASR outputs to improve overall translation quality. The main experiment presented here compares the performance of a SLT system where multiple ASR 1-best are combined before translation (source combination), with a SLT system where multiple ASR 1-best are translated, the system combination being conducted afterwards on the target side (target combination). The experimental results show that the second approach (target combination) overpasses the first one, when the performance is measured with BLEU.