The IBM 2011 GALE Arabic speech transcription system

We describe the Arabic broadcast transcription system fielded by IBM in the GALE Phase 5 machine translation evaluation. Key advances over our Phase 4 system include a new Bayesian Sensing HMM acoustic model; multistream neural network features; a MADA vowelized acoustic model; and the use of a variety of language model techniques with significant additive gains. These advances were instrumental in achieving a word error rate of 7.4% on the Phase 5 evaluation set, and an absolute improvement of 0.9% word error rate over our 2009 system on the unsequestered Phase 4 evaluation data.