Machine Translation: From Real Users to Research

The previous conference in this series (AMTA 2002) took up the theme "From Research to Real Users", and sought to explore why recent research on data-driven machine translation didn't seem to be moving to the marketplace. As it turned out, the ?rst commercial products of the data-driven research movement were just over the horizon, andintheinterveningtwoyearstheyhavebeguntoappearinthemarketplace. Atthesame time,rule-basedmachinetranslationsystemsareintroducingdata-driventechniquesinto the mix in their products. Machine translation as a software application has a 50-year history. There are an increasing number of exciting deployments of MT, many of which will be exhibited and discussed at the conference. But the scale of commercial use has never approached the estimates of the latent demand. In light of this, we reversed the question from AMTA 2002, to look at the next step in the path to commercial success for MT. We took user needs as our theme, and explored how or whether market requirements are feeding into research programs. The transition of research discoveries to practical use involves te- nicalquestionsthatarenotassexyasthosethathavedriventheresearchcommunityand research funding. Important product issues such as system customizability, computing resource requirements, and usability and ?tness for particular tasks need to engage the creativeenergiesofallpartsofourcommunity,especiallyresearch,aswemovemachine translation from a niche application to a more pervasive language conversion process. Thesetopicswereaddressedattheconferencethroughthepaperscontainedinthesep- ceedings, and even more speci?cally through several invited presentations and panels.

Inhalt

Case Study: Implementing MT for the Translation of Pre-sales Marketing and Post-sales Software Deployment Documentation at Mycom International.- A Speech-to-Speech Translation System for Catalan, Spanish, and English.- Multi-align: Combining Linguistic and Statistical Techniques to Improve Alignments for Adaptable MT.- A Modified Burrows-Wheeler Transform for Highly Scalable Example-Based Translation.- Designing a Controlled Language for the Machine Translation of Medical Protocols: The Case of English to Chinese.- Normalizing German and English Inflectional Morphology to Improve Statistical Word Alignment.- System Description: A Highly Interactive Speech-to-Speech Translation System.- A Fluency Error Categorization Scheme to Guide Automated Machine Translation Evaluation.- Online MT Services and Real Users' Needs: An Empirical Usability Evaluation.- Counting, Measuring, Ordering: Translation Problems and Solutions.- Feedback from the Field: The Challenge of Users in Motion.- The Georgetown-IBM Experiment Demonstrated in January 1954.- Pharaoh: A Beam Search Decoder for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation Models.- The PARS Family of Machine Translation Systems for Dutch System Description/Demonstration.- Rapid MT Experience in an LCTL (Pashto).- The Significance of Recall in Automatic Metrics for MT Evaluation.- Alignment of Bilingual Named Entities in Parallel Corpora Using Statistical Model.- Weather Report Translation Using a Translation Memory.- Keyword Translation from English to Chinese for Multilingual QA.- Extraction of Name and Transliteration in Monolingual and Parallel Corpora.- Error Analysis of Two Types of Grammar for the Purpose of Automatic Rule Refinement.- The Contribution of End-Users to the TransType2 Project.- An Experiment on Japanese-Uighur Machine Translation and Its Evaluation.- A Structurally Diverse Minimal Corpus for Eliciting Structural Mappings Between Languages.- Investigation of Intelligibility Judgments.- Interlingual Annotation for MT Development.- Machine Translation of Online Product Support Articles Using a Data-Driven MT System.- Maintenance Issues for Machine Translation Systems.- Improving Domain-Specific Word Alignment with a General Bilingual Corpus.- A Super-Function Based Japanese-Chinese Machine Translation System for Business Users.