Outbound Translation User Interface Ptakopět: A Pilot Study

Vilém Zouhar, Ondřej Bojar

Abstract
It is not uncommon for Internet users to have to produce a text in a foreign language they have very little knowledge of and are unable to verify the translation quality. We call the task “outbound translation” and explore it by introducing an open-source modular system Ptakopět. Its main purpose is to inspect human interaction with MT systems enhanced with additional subsystems, such as backward translation and quality estimation. We follow up with an experiment on (Czech) human annotators tasked to produce questions in a language they do not speak (German), with the help of Ptakopět. We focus on three real-world use cases (communication with IT support, describing administrative issues and asking encyclopedic questions) from which we gain insight into different strategies users take when faced with outbound translation tasks. Round trip translation is known to be unreliable for evaluating MT systems but our experimental evaluation documents that it works very well for users, at least on MT systems of mid-range quality.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.860
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6967–6975
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.860
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vilém Zouhar and Ondřej Bojar. 2020. Outbound Translation User Interface Ptakopět: A Pilot Study. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6967–6975, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Outbound Translation User Interface Ptakopět: A Pilot Study (Zouhar & Bojar, LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2020.lrec-1.860.pdf
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