The machine translation system developed by National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (we refer as NLPR-MTS later) is in leading place again in recently published results of two annual contests for machine translation systems, the China Workshop on Machine Translation (CWMT) and the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT). NLPR-MTS carried almost all first places in English-Chinese and Chinese-English bi-direction translation tests in IWSLT, among which, NLPR-MTS's performance in Chinese-English spoken language translation is much better than performance of the second place holder. In CWMT(News Area), NLPR-MTS leads solidly among 32 candidate systems from 17 domestic and abroad institutes.
System performance evaluation has gained much attention in the field of machine translation in recent years, which promoted rapid development of machine translation technology as well as evaluation technology for machine translation. Researchers working on machine translation technology research and system development all over the world all take the annual contest as a good chance to evaluate their work and try their best to get a good result.
The Chines-English spoken language translation system developed by NLPR exceeded systems developed by well known universities like CMU, MIT and RWTH successively in 2007 and 2008 IWSLT contest, gaining the first prize by manual assessment. It placed first again this year with absolute superiority. Meanwhile, NLPR text machine translation technology has developed rapidly. NLPR-MTS's extraordinary performance in IWSLT and CWMT this year demonstrates that research on machine translation in CASIA has moved into a rapid and steady developing status and is maintaining the international advanced level.
