Translation by iterative collaboration between monolingual users

ABSTRACT

In this paper we describe a new iterative translation process designed to leverage the massive number of online users who have minimal or no bilingual skill. The iterative process is supported by combining existing machine translation methods with monolingual human speakers. We have built a Web-based prototype that is capable of yielding high quality translations at much lower cost than traditional professional translators. Preliminary evaluation results of this prototype confirm the validity of the approach.

References

1. Facebook Translation App, 2009.
2. Category: Available translators in Wikipedia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 2009.
3. World Wide Lexicon Toolbar :: Add-ons for Firefox, 2009.
4. Solve Puzzles for Science | Foldit, 2009.
5. Documentation -- University Research Program for Google Translate - Google Research, 2009.
6. A. W. Ahmed, A. Badran, A. W. Black, R. Frederking, D. Gates, A. Lavie, L. Levin, K. Lenzo, L. M. Tomokiyo, J. Reichert, T. Schultz, D. Wallace, M. Woszczyna, and J. Zhang, Speechalator: Two-Way Speech-To-Speech Translation In Your Hand, In Proceedings of the European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, pages 369--372, 2003.
7. L. V. Ahn and L. Dabbish, Designing games with a purpose, In Commun. ACM, vol. 51, pages 58--67, 2008.
8. J. Allen, Post-editing, In Computers and Translation: A Translators Guide., pages 297--317, Amsterdam: John Benjamins., 2003.
9. B. B. Bederson, Experiencing the International Children's Digital Library, In interactions, vol. 15, pages 50--54, 2008.
10. L. Berlin, A Web That Speaks Your Language, In The New York Times, May. 2009.
11. O. Buzek, P. Resnik, and B. B. Bederson, Error Driven Paraphrase Annotation using Mechanical Turk, In Creating Speech and Language Data With Amazon's Mechanical Turk, NAACL 2010 Workshop, 2010.
12. C. Callison-Burch, Linear B system description for the 2005 NIST MT evaluation exercise, In Proc. NIST Machine Translation Evaluation Workshop., 2005.
13. H. H. Clark and C. R. Marshall, Definite reference and mutual knowledge, In Psycholinguistics: Critical Concepts in Psychology, page 414, 2002.
14. M. Dabbadie, A. Hartley, M. King, K. J. Miller, W. M. El Hadi, A. Popescu-Belis, F. Reeder, and M. Vanni, A hands-on study of the reliability and coherence of evaluation metrics, In Workshop at the LREC 2002 Conference, page 8, Citeseer, 2002.
15. J. Esteban, J. Lorenzo, A. S. Valderrábanos, and G. Lapalme, TransType2: an innovative computer-assisted translation system, In Proceedings of the ACL 2004 on Interactive poster and demonstration sessions, page 1, Barcelona, Spain: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2004.
16. C. Hu, Collaborative translation by monolingual users, In Proceedings of the 27th international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 3105--3108, Boston, MA, USA: ACM, 2009.
17. R. Hwa, P. Resnik, A. Weinberg, and O. Kolak, Evaluating translational correspondence using annotation projection, In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 392--399, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2002.
18. A. Komlodi, W. Hou, J. Preece, A. Druin, E. Golub, J. Alburo, S. Liao, A. Elkiss, and P. Resnik, Evaluating a cross-cultural children's online book community: Lessons learned for sociability, usability, and cultural exchange, In Interacting with Computers, vol. 19, pages 494--511, Jul. 2007.
19. E. Lagoudaki, Translation memory systems: Enlightening users' perspective, In Translation Memories Survey 2006, Imperial College London, 2006.
20. A. Lavie, F. Metze, R. Cattoni, and E. Costantini, A multi-perspective evaluation of the NESPOLE!: speech-to-speech translation system, In Proceedings of the ACL-02 workshop on Speech-to-speech translation: algorithms and systems - Volume 7, pages 121--128, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2002.
21. M. Maybury, J. Griffith, R. Holland, L. Damianos, Q. Hu, and R. Fish, Virtually Integrated Visionary Intelligence Demonstration (VIVID), In MITRE technical papers, 2005.
22. K. Mieszkowski, I make $1.45 a week and I love it, 2006.
23. R. Mihalcea and C. W. Leong, Toward communicating simple sentences using pictorial representations, In Machine Translation, vol. 22, pages 153--173, 2008.
24. D. Morita and T. Ishida, Designing Protocols for Collaborative Translation, In Principles of Practice in Multi-Agent Systems, pages 17--32, 2009.
25. R. Prasad, P. Natarajan, D. Stallard, F. Choi, S. Saleem, C. Kao, K. Subramanian, and K. Krstovski, Challenges and Future Directions for Speech-to-Speech Translation, In Panel on "Problems and Future Directions of Speech Translation Technology", 2007.
26. A. J. Quinn and B. B. Bederson, A Taxonomy of Distributed Human Computation, In Human-Computer Interaction Lab Tech Report, University of Maryland, Oct. 2009.
27. A. J. Quinn, C. Hu, T. Arisaka, A. Rose, and B. B. Bederson, Readability of scanned books in digital libraries, In Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 705--714, Florence, Italy: ACM, 2008.
28. A. J. Quinn, C. Hu, T. Arisaka, A. Rose, and B. B. Bederson, Readability of scanned books in digital libraries, In Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 705--714, Florence, Italy: ACM, 2008.
29. C. E. Shannon, A mathematical theory of communication, In SIGMOBILE Mob. Comput. Commun. Rev., vol. 5, pages 3--55, 2001.
30. M. Snover, B. Dorr, R. Schwartz, L. Micciulla, and J. Makhoul, A Study of Translation Edit Rate with Targeted Human Annotation, In Proceedings AMTA, pages 231, 223, 2006.
31. S. Soderland, C. Lim, B. Q. Mausam, O. Etzioni, and J. Pool, Lemmatic Machine Translation, In MT Summit XII: proceedings of the twelfth Machine Translation Summit, pages 128--135., Jul. 2009.
32. D. Yarowsky, G. Ngai, and R. Wicentowski, Inducing multilingual text analysis tools via robust projection across aligned corpora, In Proceedings of the first international conference on Human language technology research, pages 1--8, San Diego: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2001.
33. X. Zhu, A. B. Goldberg, M. Eldawy, C. R. Dyer, and B. Strock, A text-to-picture synthesis system for augmenting communication, In Proceedings of the 22nd national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2, pages 1590--1595, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: AAAI Press, 2007.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing