The RWTH Aachen Machine Translation System for WMT 2010

This paper describes the statistical machine translation (SMT) systems developed at RWTH Aachen University for the translation task of the NAACL 2012 Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT 2012). We participated in the evaluation campaign for the French-English and German-English language pairs in both translation directions. Both hierarchical and phrase-based SMT systems are applied. A number of different techniques are evaluated, including an insertion model, different lexical smoothing methods, a discriminative reordering extension for the hierarchical system, reverse translation, and system combination. By application of these methods we achieve considerable improvements over the respective baseline systems. 1