Computing consensus translation from multiple machine translation systems

Abstract

We address the problem of computing a consensus translation given the outputs from a set of machine translation (MT) systems. The translations from the MT systems are aligned with a multiple string alignment algorithm and the consensus translation is then computed. We describe the multiple string alignment algorithm and the consensus MT hypothesis computation. We report on the subjective and objective performance of the multilingual acquisition approach on a limited domain spoken language application. We evaluate five domain-independent off-the-shelf MT systems and show that the consensus-based translation performance is equal to or better than any of the given MT systems, in terms of both objective and subjective measures.