Patent ID: 8060358

Claim:
In a computing environment including a multiple system machine translation system, a method of selecting a hypothesis for a translation of an input source word sequence, the method comprising: inputting text as an input source word sequence to a plurality of the machine translation systems; for the input source word sequence, at each machine translation system outputting a translation hypothesis and inputting each translation hypothesis to an optimization machine of the computing environment; the optimization machine then performing each of the following: selecting a backbone from among the plurality of translation hypotheses; aligning word-to-word the hypotheses in the plurality of hypotheses to the backbone by using a hidden Markov model; constructing a confusion network, the confusion network comprising a sequence of alternative sets, where each set includes a list of alternative words; decoding the confusion network by selecting one word from each alternative set; and concatenating the selected words to form an optimized translation hypothesis for the input source word sequence.