The size of the phrase table increases dramatically as the number of links in the initial alignment gets smaller.
for both languages, S U and S G yield a much smaller Chinese  Arabic  Alignment MPL=3 MPL=7 MPL=3 MPL=7  SU  106  122  32  38  SG  161  181  48  55  SI  1331  3498  377  984  SA  954  1856  297  594  SB  876  1624  262  486   Table 7: Number of Phrases in the Phrase Table Filtered for MTEval '2003 Test Sets (in thousands) phrase table than the other three alignments.