Comparing translator acceptability of TM and SMT outputs

This paper reports on an initial study that aims to understand whether the acceptability of translation memory (TM) among translators when contrasted with machine translation (MT) unacceptability is based on users’ ability to optimise precision in match suggestions. Seven translators were asked to rate whether 60 English-German translated segments were a usable basis for a good target translation. 30 segments were from a domain-appropriate TM without a quality threshold being set, and 30 segments were translated by a general domain statistical MT system. Participants found the MT output more useful on average, with only TM fuzzy matches of over 90% considered more useful. This result suggests that, were the MT community able to provide an accurate quality threshold to users, they would consider MT to be the more useful technology

Towards a better integration of fuzzy matches in neural machine translation through data augmentation

We identify a number of aspects that can boost the performance of Neural Fuzzy Repair (NFR), an easy-to-implement method to integrate translation memory matches and neural machine translation (NMT). We explore various ways of maximising the added value of retrieved matches within the NFR paradigm for eight language combinations, using Transformer NMT systems. In particular, we test the impact of different fuzzy matching techniques, sub-word-level segmentation methods and alignment-based features on overall translation quality. Furthermore, we propose a fuzzy match combination technique that aims to maximise the coverage of source words. This is supplemented with an analysis of how translation quality is affected by input sentence length and fuzzy match score. The results show that applying a combination of the tested modifications leads to a significant increase in estimated translation quality over all baselines for all language combinations

Mobility of Contemporary Terminology

The subject of this research is the justification of the category of “terminology mobility”. The question arises about the need to study the mobility of terminology, which has not been previously analyzed. The authors focus on the characteristics of terminology mobility based on theoretical assumptions related to the concept of knowledge transfer and the dynamic nature of terminology. The authors consider mobility as a complex evolutionary process, which, unlike dynamics comparable to movement or simple replacement of linguistic units, serves as a source of terminology renewal in language. A review of modern terminological studies is carried out in order to identify the theoretical foundations and prerequisites for the formation of the new concept of “terminology mobility”. A significant role is given to discourse and social (extralinguistic) factors. We see a unique cycle of terminology mobility, starting with the identification of a term as a linguistic sign and ending with a metaterm. It is asserted that terminology mobility goes through five stages of development. The multi-stage structure of terminology mobility is manifested in the transition to a more complex sphere (domain) of functioning: from a unit of specialized knowledge, through a specialized form of their organization — a terminological system, through a specialized text, communicative situation, professional activity to the tasks and needs of society

A reception study of machine translated subtitles for MOOCs

As MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) grow rapidly around the world, the language barrier is becoming a serious issue. Removing this obstacle by creating translated subtitles is an indispensable part of developing MOOCs and improving accessibility. Given the large quantity of MOOCs available worldwide and the considerable demand for them, machine translation (MT) appears to offer an alternative or complementary translation solution, thus providing the motivation for this research. The main goal of this research is to test the impact machine translated subtitles have on Chinese viewers’ reception of MOOC content. More specifically, the author is interested in whether there is any difference between viewers’ reception of raw machine translated subtitles as opposed to fully post-edited machine translated subtitles and human translated subtitles. Reception is operationalized by adapting Gambier's (2007) model, which divides ‘reception’ into ‘the three Rs’: (i) response, (ii) reaction and (iii) repercussion. Response refers to the initial physical response of a viewer to an audio-visual stimulus, in this case the subtitle and the rest of the image. Reaction involves the cognitive follow-on from initial response, and is linked to how much effort is involved in processing the subtitling stimulus and what is understood by the viewer. Repercussion refers to attitudinal and sociocultural dimensions of AVT consumption. The research contains a pilot study and a main experiment. Mixed methods of eye-tracking, questionnaires, translation quality assessment and frequency analysis were adopted. Over 60 native Chinese speakers were recruited as participants for this research. They were divided into three groups, those who read subtitles created by raw MT, post-edited MT (PE) and human translation (HT). Results show that most participants had a positive attitude towards the subtitles regardless of their type. Participants who were offered PE subtitles scored the best overall on the selected reception metrics. Participants who were offered HT subtitles performed the worst in some of the selected reception metrics

Human Feedback in Statistical Machine Translation

The thesis addresses the challenge of improving Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems via feedback given by humans on translation quality. The amount of human feedback available to systems is inherently low due to cost and time limitations. One of our goals is to simulate such information by automatically generating pseudo-human feedback. This is performed using Quality Estimation (QE) models. QE is a technique for predicting the quality of automatic translations without comparing them to oracle (human) translations, traditionally at the sentence or word levels. QE models are trained on a small collection of automatic translations manually labelled for quality, and then can predict the quality of any number of unseen translations. We propose a number of improvements for QE models in order to increase the reliability of pseudo-human feedback. These include strategies to artificially generate instances for settings where QE training data is scarce. We also introduce a new level of granularity for QE: the level of phrases. This level aims to improve the quality of QE predictions by better modelling inter-dependencies among errors at word level, and in ways that are tailored to phrase-based SMT, where the basic unit of translation is a phrase. This can thus facilitate work on incorporating human feedback during the translation process. Finally, we introduce approaches to incorporate pseudo-human feedback in the form of QE predictions in SMT systems. More specifically, we use quality predictions to select the best translation from a number of alternative suggestions produced by SMT systems, and integrate QE predictions into an SMT system decoder in order to guide the translation generation process

USE OF LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY TO IMPROVE MATCHING AND RETRIEVAL IN TRANSLATION MEMORY

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyCurrent Translation Memory (TM) tools lack semantic knowledge while matching. Most TM tools compute similarity at the string level, which does not take into account semantic aspects in matching. Therefore, semantically similar segments, which differ on the surface form, are often not retrieved. In this thesis, we present five novel and efficient approaches to incorporate advanced semantic knowledge in translation memory matching and retrieval. Two efficient approaches which use a paraphrase database to improve translation memory matching and retrieval are presented. Both automatic and human evaluations are conducted. The results on both evaluations show that paraphrasing improves matching and retrieval. An approach based on manually designed features extracted using NLP systems and resources is presented, where a Support Vector Machine (SVM) regression model is trained, which calculates the similarity between two segments. The approach based on manually designed features did not retrieve better matches than simple edit-distance. Two approaches for retrieving segments from a TM using deep learning are investigated. The first one is based on Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks, while the other one is based on Tree Structured Long Short Term Memory (Tree-LSTM) networks. Eight different models using different datasets and settings are trained. The results are comparable to a baseline which uses simple edit-distance