This is the multi-engine matchine translation system from Carnegie Mellon.  
Contact kheafiel+memt at cs.cmu.edu
The latest release is available from https://github.com/kpu/MEMT .  

This document shows how to compile and run the system.  For technical documentation, see http://kheafield.com/professional/.

REQUIREMENTS
We assume the following are installed:
java (for METEOR and ZMERT)
python (for METEOR's installation)
bash

Scripts are provided in ../install for the following (see ../install/README):
icu >= 4.2
boost >= 1.42.0
ruby

You will also need a tokenizer and an APRA format language model.  

COMPILATION
In the root directory, run:
./bjam [-jPARALLELISM]
MEMT/Alignment/compile.sh

The MEMT/Alignment/compile.sh command will also download and setup evaluation metrics if they haven't been already.  Downloading the paraphrase corpus takes a while.  

TUNING
MEMT uses weights tuned to the specific systems begin combined.   This shows how to find those weights using MERT.  

Running MERT requires three files in a working directory: dev.matched, dev.reference, and decoder_config_base .  Below are instructions for creating each of them.  

For each system, create a file containing _tokenized_ 1-best output, one sentence per line.  A tokenizer is not provided.  
Run
# Alignment/match.sh system0.txt system1.txt ... systemn.txt >dev.matched
This runs the METEOR matcher on the system outputs.  

The dev.reference file contains references in plain text.  If there's more than reference, place the references for a single sentence consecutively, like so:
reference 0 for sentence 0
reference 1 for sentence 0
reference 0 for sentence 1
reference 1 for sentence 1
This is the format used by METEOR's text files and by ZMERT.  It should be normal text; no need to tokenize or lowercase.  

decoder_config_base contains the decoder configuration without weights.  Here's an example that works alright:
beam_size = 500
output.nbest = 300
horizon.stay_threshold = 0.8
horizon.method = length
horizon.radius = 7
length_normalize = false

score.verbatim0.individual = 2
score.verbatim0.collective = 2
score.verbatim0.mask = self exact boundary

score.verbatim1.individual = 3
score.verbatim1.collective = 3
score.verbatim1.mask = unknown exact snowball_stem wn_stem wn_synonymy paraphrase artificial self transitive boundary

This will use 5 features per system plus length, LM score and LM OOV count.  The 5 features per system count exact matches for unigrams and bigrams (verbatim0) and separately any type of match for unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams (verbatim1).  

The example configuration file in my MT Marathon 2010 paper Combining Machine Translation Output with Open Source: The Carnegie Mellon Multi-Engine Machine Translation Scheme used quotes around vectors of options.  The quotes should not be used with Boost >= 1.42.0 due to https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/850 .  In any case, you're fine leaving them out.  

For documentation of the various options, run scripts/server.sh --help

Launch the decoding server.  Tell it where to find the language model (using --lm.file foo.arpa) and which port to run on (e.g. --port 2000)
MEMT/scripts/server.sh --lm.file foo.arpa --port 2000
It will print "Accepting Connections" when ready.  Background it or go to another terminal.  

Run MERT: MEMT/scripts/zmert/run.rb working/directory 2000 language
You can also specify host:port to find the server.   Multiple MERTs can use the same server in parallel.

The end product of the MERT run is working/directory/decoder_config.  

DECODING
This requires a running decoding server, decoder_config (including tuned weights), and a matched input file.  
Run MEMT/scripts/simple_decode.rb 2000 decoder_config matched

SCORING
The Utilities/scoring directory contains a scoring script.  Run score.rb to see options.  Typically you can run score.rb --hyp-tok output.1best --refs-laced reference.txt which produces output.1best.scores.  Run score.rb without an argument for documentation.