Experiences With an On-Line Translating Dialogue System

EXPERIENCES WITH AN ON-LINE TRANSLATING DIALOGUE SYSTEM Seiji MHKE, Koichi HASEBE, Harold SOMERS , Shin-ya AMANO Research and Development Center Toshiba Corporation 1, Komukai Toshiba-cho, Saiwai-ku Kawasaki-City, Kanagawa, 210 Japan ABSTRACT An English-Japanese bi-directional machine translation system was connected to a keyboard conversation function on a workstation, and tested via a satellite link with users in Japan and Switzerland. The set-up is described, and some informal observations on the nature of the bilin- gual dialogues reported. INTRODUCTION We have been developing an English-Japanese bi-directional machine translation system imple- mented on a workstation (Amano 1986, Amano et a/. 1987). The system, which is interactive and designed for use by a translator, normally runs in an interactive mode, and includes a number of spe- cial bilingual editing functions. We recently real- ized a real-time on-line communication system with an automatic translation function by combin- ing a non-imeractive version of our Machine Trans- lation system with the keyboard conversation func- tion just like talk in UNIX**. Using this system, bilingual conversations were held between mem- bers of our laboratory in Japan and visitors to the 5th World Telecommunications Exhibition Tele- corn 87, organized by the International Telecom- munication Union, held in Geneva from 20th to 27th October 1987. In the fh-st part of this paper, we discuss in detail the configuration of this system, and give some indications of its performance. In the second part, we report informally on what for us was an interesting aspect of the experiment, namely the nature of the dialogues held using the system. In *the Centre for Computational Linguistics, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, England **UNIX is a trademark of AT&T Bell Labora- tories. particular we were struck by the amount of meta- dialogue, i.e. dialogue discussing the previous interchanges: since contributions to the conversa- tion were being translated, this metadialogue posed certain problems which we think are of gen- eral interest. In future systems of a similar nature, we feel there is a need for users to be briefly trained in certain conventions regarding metadialogue, and typical system translation errors. Furthermore, an environment which mini- mizes such errors is desirable and the system must be 'tuned' to make translations appropriate to con- versation. SYSTEM CONFIGURATION A general idea of the system is illustrated in Figure 1. Workstations were situated in Japan and Switzerland, and linked by a conventional satel- lite telephone connection. The workstations at either end were AS3260C machines. Running UNIX, they support the Toshiba Machine Transla- tion system AS-TRANSAC. On this occasion, the Machine Translation capability was installed only at the Japanese end, though in practice both termi- nals could run AS-TRANSAC. The workstation screens are divided into three windows, as shown in Figure 2, not unlike in the normal version of UNIX's talk. The top window shows the user's dialogue, the middle window the correspondenfs replies. The important difference is that both sides of the dialogue are displayed in the language appropriate to the location of the ter- minal. However, …

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