This paper gives a description of the statistical machine
translation (SMT) systems developed at the TALP Research
Center of the UPC (Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya)
for our participation in the IWSLT’08 evaluation campaign.
We present Ngram-based (TALPtuples) and phrase-based
(TALPphrases) SMT systems. The paper explains the 2008
systems’ architecture and outlines translation schemes we
have used, mainly focusing on the new techniques that are
challenged to improve speech-to-speech translation quality.
The novelties we have introduced are: improved reordering
method, linear combination of translation and reordering
models and new technique dealing with punctuation marks
insertion for a phrase-based SMT system.
This year we focus on the Arabic-English, Chinese-Spanish and pivot Chinese-(English)-Spanish translation
tasks.Postprint (published version