We compared alignments obtained using the widely used program tercom with alignments obtained with ITGs and we established that the ITG alignments are superior in two ways.
: (a) we showed that invWER (computed using the ITG alignments) gives a better approximation to TER between machine translation outputs and human references than tercom; and (b) in an oracle system combination experiment, we found that confusion networks generated with ITG alignments contain better oracles, both in terms of tercomTER and in terms of BLEU.