Joint optimization for machine translation system combination

System combination has emerged as a powerful method for machine translation (MT). This paper pursues a joint optimization strategy for combining outputs from multiple MT systems, where word alignment, ordering, and lexical selection decisions are made jointly according to a set of feature functions combined in a single log-linear model. The decoding algorithm is described in detail and a set of new features that support this joint decoding approach is proposed. The approach is evaluated in comparison to state-of-the-art confusion-network-based system combination methods using equivalent features and shown to outperform them significantly.