Recent improvements in BBN's English/Iraqi speech-to-speech translation system

We report on recent improvements in our English/Iraqi Arabic speech-to-speech translation system. User interface improvements include a novel parallel approach to user confirmation which makes confirmation cost-free in terms of dialog duration. Automatic speech recognition improvements include the incorporation of state-of-the-art techniques in feature transformation and discriminative training. Machine translation improvements include a novel combination of multiple alignments derived from various pre-processing techniques, such as Arabic segmentation and English word compounding, higher order N-grams for target language model, and use of context in form of semantic classes and part-of-speech tags.