This paper describes a pilot study with a computed-assisted translation workbench aiming at testing the integration of online and active learning features. We investigate the effect of these features on translation productivity, using interactive translation prediction (ITP) as a baseline. User activity data were collected from five beta testers using key-logging and eye-tracking. User feedback was also collected at the end of the experiments in the form of retrospective think-aloud protocols. We found that OL performs better than ITP, especially in terms of translation speed. In addition, AL provides better translation quality than ITP for the same levels of user effort. We plan to incorporate these features in the final version of the workbench.

This paper describes the field trial and subsequent evaluation of a post-editing workbench which is currently under development in the EU-funded CasMaCat project. Based on user evaluations of the initial prototype of the workbench, this second prototype of the workbench includes a number of interactive features designed to improve productivity and user satisfaction. Using CasMaCat’s own facilities for logging keystrokes and eye tracking, data were collected from nine post-editors in a professional setting. These data were then used to investigate the effects of the interactive features on productivity, quality, user satisfaction and cognitive load as reflected in the post-editors’ gaze activity. These quantitative results are combined with the qualitative results derived from user questionnaires and interviews conducted with all the participants.

This paper presents the submissions of the PRHLT group for the evaluation campaign of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation. We focus on the development of reliable translation systems between syntactically different languages (DIALOG task) and on the efficient training of SMT models in resource-rich scenarios (TALK task).

Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are of great interest in multilingual environments. We studied the case of the Comunitat Valenciana where the two official languages are Spanish and Valencian. These two languages share most of their phonemes, and their syntax and vocabulary are also quite similar since they have influenced each other for many years. We constructed a system, and trained its acoustic models with a small corpus of Spanish and Valencian, which has produced poor results due to the lack of data. Adaptation techniques can be used to adapt acoustic models that are trained with a large corpus of a language inr order to obtain acoustic models for a phonetically similar language. This process is known as language adaptation. The Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (MLLR) technique has commonly been used in speaker adaptation; however we have used MLLR in language adaptation. We compared several MLLR variants (mean square, diagonal matrix and full matrix) for language adaptation in order to choose the best alternative for our system.

In this paper we describe the statistical machine translation system developed at ITI/UPV, which aims especially at speech recognition and statistical machine translation integration, for the evaluation campaign of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (2007). The system we have developed takes advantage of an improved word lattice representation that uses word posterior probabilities. These word posterior probabilities are then added as a feature to a log-linear model. This model includes a stochastic finite-state transducer which allows an easy lattice integration. Furthermore, it provides a statistical phrase-based reordering model that is able to perform local reorderings of the output. We have tested this model on the Italian-English corpus, for clean text, 1-best ASR and lattice ASR inputs. The results and conclusions of such experiments are reported at the end of this paper.

As Speech Recognition Systems improve, they become suitable for facingnew problems. Multilingual speech recognition is one such problems. In the present work, the case of the Comunitat Valenciana multilingual environment is studied. The official languages in the Comunitat Valenciana (Spanish and Valencian) share most of their acoustic units, and their vocabularies and syntax are quite similar. They have influenced each other for many years.A small corpus on an Information System task was developed for experimentationpurposes.This choice will make it possible to develop a working prototype in the future,and it is simple enough to build semi-automatic language models. The design of the acoustic corpus is discussed, showing that all combinations of accents have been studied (native, non-native speakers, male, female, etc.).