Interactive machine translation
Interactive machine translation (IMT), is a specific sub-field of
Interactive machine translation is specially interesting when translating texts in domains where it is not admissible to output a translation containing errors, hence requiring a human user to amend the translations provided by the system. In such cases, interactive machine translation has been proved to provide benefit to potential users.[1][2][3] Nevertheless, there are few
History
Historically, interactive machine translation is born as an evolution of the
Later, a larger-scale research project, TransType2,[1]
More recently, CASMACAT,[5] also funded by the European Commission, aimed at developing novel types of assistance to human translators and integrated them into a new workbench, consisting of an editor, a server, and analysis and visualisation tools. The workbench was designed in a modular fashion and can be combined with existing computer aided translation tools. Furthermore, the CASMACAT workbench can learn from the interaction with the human translator by updating and adapting its models instantly based on the translation choices of the user.[6][7]
Recent work on involving an extensive evaluation with human users[8] revealed the fact that interactive machine translation may even be used by users that do not speak the source language in order to achieve near professional translation quality. Moreover, it also elucidated the fact that an interactive scenario is more beneficial than a classic post-edition scenario.
The previously described approaches rely on a tightly coupled underlying corpus-based machine translation system (usually, a
Process
The interactive machine translation process starts with the system suggesting a translation hypothesis to the user. Then, the user may accept the complete sentence as correct, or may modify it if he considers there is some error. Typically, when modifying a given word, it is assumed that the prefix until that word is correct, leading to a left-to-right interaction scheme. Once the user has changed the word considered incorrect, the system then proposes a new suffix, i.e. the remainder of the sentence. Such process continues until the translation provided satisfies the user.
Although explained at the word level, the previous process may also be implemented at the character level, and hence the system provides a suffix whenever the human translator types in a single character. In addition, there is ongoing effort towards changing the typical left-to-right interaction scheme in order to make
A similar approach is used in the Caitra translation tool.
Evaluation
Evaluation is a difficult issue in interactive machine translation. Ideally, evaluation should take place in experiments involving human users. However, given the high monetary cost this would imply, this is seldom the case. Moreover, even when considering human translators in order to perform a true evaluation of interactive machine translation techniques, it is not clear what should be measured in such experiments, since there are many different variables that should be taken into account and cannot be controlled, as is for instance the time the user takes in order to get used to the process. In the CASMACAT project, some field trials have been carried out to study some of these variables.[12][13][14]
For quick evaluations in laboratory conditions, interactive machine translation is measured by using the key stroke ratio or the word stroke ratio. Such criteria attempt to measure how many key-strokes or words did the user need to introduce before producing the final translated document.[3]
Differences with classical computer-aided translation
Although interactive machine translation is a sub-field of
See also
- Machine translation
- Statistical machine translation
- Computer-aided translation
- Computational linguistics
- Postediting
- Translation
References
- ^ a b
Casacuberta, Francisco; Civera, Jorge; Cubel, Elsa; Lagarda, Antonio L.; Lapalme, Guy; Macklovitch, Elliott; Vidal, Enrique (2009). "Human interaction for high quality machine translation" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. 52 (10): 135–138. doi:10.1145/1562764.1562798. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2011-07-06.
- arXiv:1903.02978 [cs.HC].
- ^ a b c Barrachina, Sergio; Bender, Oliver; Casacuberta, Francisco; Civera, Jorge; Cubel, Elsa; Khadivi, Shahram; Lagarda, Antonio L.; Ney, Hermann; Tomás, Jesús; Vidal, Enrique (2009). "Statistical approaches to computer-assisted translation" (PDF). Computational Linguistics. 25 (1): 3–28. .
- ^ Foster, George; Isabelle, Pierre; Plamondon, Pierre (1997). "Target-text mediated interactive machine translation". Machine Translation. 12 (1): 175–194. .
- ^ Alabau, Vicent; Buck, Christian; Carl, Michael; Casacuberta, Francisco; Garcia-Martinez, Mercedes; Germann, Ulrich; Gonzalez-Rubio, Jesus; Hill, Robin; Koehn, Philipp; Leiva, Luis; Mesa-Lao, Barto; Ortiz, Daniel; Saint-Amand, Herve; Sanchis, German; Tsoukala, Chara (April 2014). "CASMACAT: A Computer-assisted Translation Workbench" (PDF). Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Los Angeles, California: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 25–28.
- ^ Ortiz-Martinez, Daniel; Garcia-Varea, Ismael; Casacuberta, Francisco (June 2010). "Online Learning for Interactive Statistical Machine Translation" (PDF). Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL. Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 546–554.
- ^
Martinez-Gomez, Pascual; Sanchis-Trilles, German; Casacuberta, Francisco (September 2012). "Online adaptation strategies for statistical machine translation in post-editing scenarios". Pattern Recognition. 45 (9). Elsevier: 3193–3203. hdl:10251/37324.
- ^ Koehn, Philipp (June 2010). "Enabling Monolingual Translators: Post-Editing vs. Options" (PDF). Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT/NAACL). Los Angeles, California: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 537–545.
- ^ Juan Antonio, Pérez-Ortiz; Torregrosa, Daniel; Forcada, Mikel (2014). "Black-box integration of heterogeneous bilingual resources into an interactive translation system". Proceedings of the EACL 2014 Workshop on Humans and Computer-assisted Translation. Los Angeles, California: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 57–65.
- ^ Sanchis-Trilles, Germán; Ortiz-Martínez, Daniel; Civera, Jorge; Casacuberta, Francisco; Vidal, Enrique; Hoang, Hieu (October 2008). "Improving Interactive Machine Translation via Mouse Actions" (PDF). Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Honolulu, Hawaii: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 485–494.
- ^ González-Rubio, Jesús; Ortiz-Martínez, Daniel; Casacuberta, Francisco (July 2010). "Balancing User Effort and Translation Error in Interactive Machine Translation via Confidence Measures" (PDF). Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Conference Short Papers (ACL). Uppsala, Sweden: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 173–177.
- ^ Underwood, Nancy; Mesa-Lao, Bartolomé; García-Martínez, Mercedes; Carl, Michael; Alabau, Vicent; González-Rubio, Jesús; Leiva, Luis; Sanchis-Trilles, Germán; Ortiz-Martínez, Daniel; Casacuberta, Francisco (May 2014). "Evaluating the Effects of Interactivity in a Post-Editing Workbench" (PDF). Proceedings of the 29th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC). Reykjavik, Iceland. pp. 553–559.
- ^ Ortiz-Martínez, Daniel; González-Rubio, Jesús; Alabau, Vicent; Sanchis-Trilles, Germán; Casacuberta, Francisco (August 2015). "Integrating Online and Active Learning in a Computer-Assisted Translation Workbench". New Directions in Empirical Translation Process Research: Exploring the CRITT TPR-DB. Springer. pp. 54–73.
- ^ Alabau, Vicent; Carl, Michael; Casacuberta, Francisco; García-Martínez, Mercedes; Mesa-Lao, Bartolomé; Ortiz-Martínez, Daniel; González-Rubio, Jesús; Sanchis-Trilles, Germán; Schaeffer, Moritz (August 2015). "Learning Advanced Post-editing". New Directions in Empirical Translation Process Research: Exploring the CRITT TPR-DB. Springer. pp. 95–111.