Enhancing Bi-directional English-Tigrigna Machine Translation Using Hybrid Approach

Machine Translation (MT) is an application area of NLP where automatic systems are used to translate text or speech from one language to another while preserving the meaning of the source language. Although there exists a large volume of literature in automatic machine translation of documents in many languages, the translation between English and Tigrigna is less explored. Therefore, we proposed the hybrid approach to address the challenges of applying syntactic reordering rules which align and capture the structural arrangement of words in the source sentence to become more like the target sentences. Two language models were developed- one for English and another for Tigrigna and about 12,000 parallel sentences in four domains and 32,000 bilingual dictionaries were collected for our experiment. The parallel collected corpus was split randomly to 10,800 sentences for training set and 1,200 sentences for testing. Moses open source statistical machine translation system has been used for the experiment to train, tune and decode. The parallel corpus was aligned using the Giza++ toolkit and SRILM was used for building the language model. Three main experiments were conducted using statistical approach, hybrid approach and post-processing technique. According to our experimental result showed good translation output as high as 32.64 BLEU points Google translator and the hybrid approach was found most promising for English-Tigrigna bi-directional translation

Multisensory 360 videos under varying resolution levels enhance presence

Omnidirectional videos have become a leading multimedia format for Virtual Reality applications. While live 360◦ videos offer a unique immersive experience, streaming of omnidirectional content at high resolutions is not always feasible in bandwidth-limited networks. While in the case of flat videos, scaling to lower resolutions works well, 360◦ video quality is seriously degraded because of the viewing distances involved in head-mounted displays. Hence, in this paper, we investigate first how quality degradation impacts the sense of presence in immersive Virtual Reality applications. Then, we are pushing the boundaries of 360◦ technology through the enhancement with multisensory stimuli. 48 participants experimented both 360◦ scenarios (with and without multisensory content), while they were divided randomly between four conditions characterised by different encoding qualities (HD, FullHD, 2.5K, 4K). The results showed that presence is not mediated by streaming at a higher bitrate. The trend we identified revealed however that presence is positively and significantly impacted by the enhancement with multisensory content. This shows that multisensory technology is crucial in creating more immersive experiences