Modelling Source- and Target- Language Syntactic Information as Conditional Context in Interactive Neural Machine Translation

Comprehension and Trust in Crises: Investigating the Impact of Machine Translation and Post-Editing Alessandra Rossetti(1,2), Sharon O'Brien(1,2), Patrick Cadwell(2) (1) ADAPT Centre (2) School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies Dublin City University, Dublin Ireland {alessandra.rossetti, sharon.obrien, patrick.cadwell} @dcu.ie Abstract We conducted a survey to understand the impact of machine translation and post- editing awareness on comprehension of and trust in messages disseminated to prepare the public for a weather-related crisis, i.e. flooding. The translation direc- tion was English–Italian. Sixty-one par- ticipants—all native Italian speakers with different English proficiency levels— answered our survey. Each participant read and evaluated between three and six crisis messages using ratings and open- ended questions on comprehensibility and trust. The messages were in English and Italian. All the Italian messages had been machine translated and post-edited. Nevertheless, participants were told that only half had been post-edited, so that we could test the impact of post-editing awareness. We could not draw firm con- clusions when comparing the scores for trust and comprehensibility assigned to the three types of messages—English, post-edits, and purported raw outputs. However, when scores were triangulated with open-ended answers, stronger pat- terns were observed, such as the impact of fluency of the translations on their comprehensibility and trustworthiness. We found correlations between compre- hensibility and trustworthiness, and iden- tified other factors influencing these as- pects, such as the clarity and soundness of the messages. We conclude by outlin- © 2020 The authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence, no derivative works, at- tribution, CC-BY-ND. ing implications for crisis preparedness, limitations, and areas for future research. 1 Introduction Societies are becoming increasingly multicultural and multilingual, mainly as a result of economic migration and displacement (O'Brien and Federi- ci, 2019). In Ireland, for example, there are more than 500 thousand non-Irish nationals, the major- ity of whom come from a country where English is not the official language, e.g. Poland, Lithua- nia, Brazil, and Italy (Central Statistics Office, 2016). Non-native speakers of a language—and especially those with limited proficiency—need to overcome considerable communication chal- lenges in the contexts of crises (Santos- Hernández and Morrow, 2013; Sherly et al., 2015). Taking again Ireland as an example, flooding is the most common hazard that the country needs to manage (Jeffers, 2011). When substan- tial, flooding poses a threat to infrastructure, business, and also people’s health (Major Emer- gency Management, 2016). In order to be safe and act upon the messages sent by emergency responders, linguistically diverse communities need to be able to comprehend and trust those messages (Alexander and Pescaroli, 2019). Ma- chine translation (MT) and post-editing (PE) can play a role in crisis communication but their ap- plication needs careful consideration. This paper describes the results of a survey whose goal was to address two important gaps in relation to the role of MT and PE as enablers of multilingual communication in crises. Specifical- ly, we set out to gather empirical evidence on the impact of MT and of PE awareness on …

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