Overview of the IWSLT 2008 evaluation campaign

This paper gives an overview of the evaluation campaign results of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) 20081. In this workshop, we focused on the translation of spontaneous speech recorded in a real situation and the feasability of pivot-language-based translation approaches. The translation directions were English into Chinese and vice versa for the Challenge Task, Chinese into English and English into Spanish for the Pivot Task, and Arabic, Chinese, Spanish into English for the standard BTEC Task. In total, 19 research groups building 58 MT engines participated in this year’s event. Automatic and subjective evaluations were carried out in order to investigate the impact of spontaneity aspects of field data experiments on automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) system performance as well as the robustness of stateof-the-art MT systems towards speech-to-speech translation in real environments.