An MAT Tool and Its Effectiveness

An MAT Tool and Its Effectiveness Robert Frederking, Dean Grannes, Peter Cousseau, Sergei Nirenburg Carnegie Mellon University Center for Machine Translation Pittsburgh, PA 15213 ABSTRACT Although automatic machine translation (MT) of unconstrained text is beyond the state of the art today, the need for increased translator productivity is urgent. The PANI3LOSS system addresses this dilemma by integrating MT with machine-aided translation (MAT). The main measure of progress in the development of the PANGLOSS system is a gradual increase in the level of automation. The current PANGLOSS MT system typically generates sub-sentence-length units of the target text. Any remaining gaps are treated by lexicon lookup. A mixture of these two kinds of components is presented to the user using the CMAT (Component Machine-Aided Translation) editor, which was designed to facilitate the transformation of this output into a high- quality text. An experiment evaluating the utility of the CMAT editor demonstrated its usefulness in this task, and provides useful guidance for further development. 1. Introduction Fully automated machine translation of unconstrained texts is beyond the state of the art today. The need for mechanizing the translation process is, however, very urgent. It is desirable, therefore, to seek ways of both speeding up the process of translating texts and making it less expensive. In this paper we describe an environment that facilitates the integration of automatic machine translation (MT) and machine-aided translation (MAT). This environment, called the Translator's Workstation (TWS)[5], has been developed in the framework of the PAN- GLOSS machine translation project. 1 The main goal of this project is to develop a system that will, from the very begin- ning, produce high-quality output. This can only be attained currently by keeping the human being in the translation loop. The main measure of progress in the development of the Pan- gloss system is the gradual increase in the level of automation. PANGLOSS MARK I translates from Spanish into English, al- though additional source languages are planned. The analyzer used in this configuration is a version of the ULTRA Spanish analyzer from NMSU[2], while generation is carried out by the PENMAN generator from ISI[4]. The Translator's Work- 1pANGLOSS is a joint project of the Center for Machine Translation at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the Computing Research Laboratory of New Mexico State University (NMSU), and the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California (ISI). station provides the user interface and the integration plat- form. It is similar in spirit to systems such as the Translator's Workbench[3]. The processing in PANGLOSS goes as follows: 1. an input passage is broken into sentences; 2. a fully-automated translation of each full sentence is at- tempted; if it fails, then 3. a fully-automated translation of smaller chunks of text is attempted (currently, these are noun phrases); . the material that does not get covered by noun phrases is treated in a "word-for-word" mode, whereby translation suggestions for each word (or phrase) are sought in the system's MT lexicons, an online bilingual dictionary, and a set of …

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