This document describes the participation of Webinterpret in the shared task on parallel corpus filtering at the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT 2019). Here, we describe the main characteristics of our approach and discuss the results obtained on the data sets published for the shared task.

This paper describes the participation of Webinterpret in the shared task on parallel corpus filtering at the Third Conference on Machine Translation (WMT 2018). The paper describes the main characteristics of our approach and discusses the results obtained on the data sets published for the shared task.

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 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.

We investigate the problem of combining the outputs of different translation systems into a minimum Bayes’ risk consensus translation. We explore different risk formulations based on the BLEU score, and provide a dynamic programming decoding algorithm for each of them. In our experiments, these algorithms generated consensus translations with better risk, and more efficiently, than previous proposals.

We present a method to estimate the quality of automatic translations when reference translations are not available. Quality estimation is addressed as a two-step regression problem where multiple features are combined to predict a quality score. Given a set of features, we aim at automatically extracting the variables that better explain translation quality, and use them to predict the quality score. The soundness of our approach is assessed by the encouraging results obtained in an exhaustive experimentation with several feature sets. Moreover, the studied approach is highly-scalable allowing us to employ hundreds of features to predict translation quality.

Currently, a great effort is being carried out in the digitalisation of large historical document collections for preservation purposes. The documents in these collections are usually written in ancient languages, such as Latin or Greek, which limits the access of the general public to their content due to the language barrier. Therefore, digital libraries aim not only at storing raw images of digitalised documents, but also to annotate them with their corresponding text transcriptions and translations into modern languages. Unfortunately, ancient languages have at their disposal scarce electronic resources to be exploited by natural language processing techniques. This paper describes the compilation process of a novel Latin-Catalan parallel corpus as a new task for statistical machine translation (SMT). Preliminary experimental results are also reported using a state-of-the-art phrase-based SMT system. The results presented in this work reveal the complexity of the task and its challenging, but interesting nature for future development.

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).