A three-pass system combination framework by combining multiple hypothesis alignment methods

Abstract

So far, many effective hypothesis alignment metrics have been proposed and applied to the system combination, such as TER, HMM, ITER and IHMM. In addition, the Minimum Bayes-risk (MBR) decoding and the confusion network (CN) have become the state-of-the art techniques in system combination. In this paper, we present a three-pass system combination strategy that can combine hypothesis alignment results derived from different alignment metrics to generate a better translation. Firstly the different alignment metrics are carried out to align the backbone and hypotheses, and the individual CN is built corresponding to each alignment results; then we construct a super network by merging the multiple metric-based CN and generate a consensus output. Finally a modified consensus network MBR (ConMBR) approach is employed to search a best translation. Our proposed strategy out performs the best single CN as well as the best single system in our experiments on NIST Chinese-to-English test set.