For the NEWS 2009 and 2010 Shared Tasks, the discriminative DIRECTL+ system that incorporates many-to-many alignments, online maxmargin training and a phrasal decoder was shown to function well as a general string transduction tool; while originally designed for grapheme-tophoneme conversion, it produced excellent results for machine transliteration (Jiampojamarn et al., 2009;<cite> Jiampojamarn et al., 2010b)</cite> , leading us to re-use it here.