Improving the translation environment for professional translators

When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side. This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project

ISIPTA'07: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications

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Social Support Shopping: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity in Disability Insurance Reform

This paper examines how a change in the generosity of one social assistance program generates spillovers onto other social assistance programs. We exploit an age discontinuity in the stringency of the 1993 Dutch disability reforms to estimate the causal effect of exit from disability insurance (DI) on participation in other social assistance programs. We find strong evidence of "social support shopping": 43 percent of those induced to leave DI due to the reform receive an alternative form of social assistance two years after the implementation of the reform. As a result, for each Euro saved in DI benefits, the government has to spend an extra 60 cents in other social assistance programs. This crowd-out rate grows from 60% to 69% if we also take into account the response of the partners’ of those affected by the DI reform. The crowd-out effect declines over time, but is still 25% eight years after the reform.crowd-out, spillover effects, social insurance, income assistance, welfare, regression discontinuity, administrative data

Learning Language from a Large (Unannotated) Corpus

A novel approach to the fully automated, unsupervised extraction of dependency grammars and associated syntax-to-semantic-relationship mappings from large text corpora is described. The suggested approach builds on the authors' prior work with the Link Grammar, RelEx and OpenCog systems, as well as on a number of prior papers and approaches from the statistical language learning literature. If successful, this approach would enable the mining of all the information needed to power a natural language comprehension and generation system, directly from a large, unannotated corpus.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, research proposa

Thinking About Decisions: An Integrative Approach Of Person And Task Factors

Decisions vary. They may vary in both content and complexity. People also vary. An important way that people vary is how much they think. Some prior research investigating thinking and decision making largely conflicts with most traditional decision theories. For example, if considering an array of products to choose from, thinking more about the alternative's attributes should lead to a better decision. However, some research indicates that thinking more may also lead to focusing on irrelevant aspects of the decision and a less optimal outcome. We propose that this conflict in the literature exists because of a failure to consider the interaction between the individual and the decision task. To test this, we used separate methodologies that enhance or attenuate a person's thinking. In Study 1, we selected people who were especially high or low in need for cognition and had them complete a robust decision-making inventory, which included both complex and simple tasks. In Study 2, we manipulated participant's level of glucose, which acts as the brain's fuel to enhance or attenuate thinking ability. Both studies provide insight for understanding our central tenant that more thought leads to better decisions in complex tasks but does not influence simple decisions. These findings show how the individual's thinking can interact with the constructive elements of the task to shape decision choice