Human effort and machine learnability in computer aided translation

Spence Green, Sida Wang, Jason Chuang, Jeffrey Heer, Sebastian Schuster, Christopher D. Manning

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

57 Scopus citations

Abstract

Analyses of computer aided translation typically focus on either frontend interfaces and human effort, or backend translation and machine learnability of corrections. However, this distinction is artificial in practice since the frontend and backend must work in concert. We present the first holistic, quantitative evaluation of these issues by contrasting two assistive modes: postediting and interactive machine translation (MT). We describe a new translator interface, extensive modifications to a phrasebased MT system, and a novel objective function for re-tuning to human corrections. Evaluation with professional bilingual translators shows that post-edit is faster than interactive at the cost of translation quality for French-English and English- German. However, re-tuning the MT system to interactive output leads to larger, statistically significant reductions in HTER versus re-tuning to post-edit. Analysis shows that tuning directly to HTER results in fine-grained corrections to subsequent machine output.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2014 - 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1225-1236
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781937284961
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2014 - Doha, Qatar
Duration: Oct 25 2014Oct 29 2014

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2014 - 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference

Other

Other2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2014
Country/TerritoryQatar
CityDoha
Period10/25/1410/29/14

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Information Systems

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