Summary
The MIT-LL/AFRL MT system implements a standard phrase-based, statistical translation model. It incorporates a number of extensions that improve performance for speech-based translation. During this evaluation our efforts focused on the rapid porting of our SMT system to a new language (Arabic) and novel approaches to translation from speech input. This paper discusses the architecture of the MIT-LL/AFRL MT system, improvements over our 2007 system, and experiments we ran during the IWSLT-2007 evaluation. Specifically, we focus on 1) experiments comparing the performance of confusion network decoding and direct lattice decoding techniques for speech machine translation, 2) the application of lightweight morphology for Arabic MT pre-processing and 3) improved confusion network decoding.