We describe the systems developed by the team of the Qatar Computing Research Institute for the WMT12 Shared Translation Task. We used a phrase-based statistical machine translation model with several non-standard settings, most notably tuning data selection and phrase table combination. The evaluation results show that we rank second in BLEU and TER for Spanish-English, and in the top tier for German-English.

@InProceedings{guzman-EtAl:2012:WMT, author = {Guzm{\'a}n, Francisco and Nakov, Preslav and Thabet, Ahmed and Vogel, Stephan}, title = {{QCRI} at {WMT}12: Experiments in Spanish-English and German-English Machine Translation of News Text}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation ({WMT'12})}, month = {June}, year = {2012}, address = {Montr{\'e}al, Canada}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, pages = {298--303}, url = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W12-3136}, abstract = {We describe the systems developed by the team of the Qatar Computing Research Institute for the WMT12 Shared Translation Task. We used a phrase-based statistical machine translation model with several non-standard settings, most notably tuning data selection and phrase table combination. The evaluation results show that we rank second in BLEU and TER for Spanish-English, and in the top tier for German-English.} }