Code-switching (CS) is a very common phenomenon in regions with various co-existing languages. Since CS is such a frequent habit in informal communications, both spoken and written, it also arises naturally in Human-Machine Interactions. Therefore, in order for natural language understanding (NLU) not to be degraded, CS must be taken into account when developing chatbots. The co-existence of multiple languages in a single NLU model has become feasible with multilingual language representation models such as mBERT. In this paper, the efficacy of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning with mBERT for NLU is evaluated on a Basque-Spanish CS chatbot corpus, comparing the performance of NLU models trained using in-domain chatbot utterances in Basque and/or Spanish without CS. The results obtained indicate that training joint multi-intent classification and entity recognition models on both languages simultaneously achieves best performance, better capturing the CS patterns.

This paper describes the evaluation methodology followed to measure the impact of using a machine learning algorithm to automatically segment intralingual subtitles. The segmentation quality, productivity and self-reported post-editing effort achieved with such approach are shown to improve those obtained by the technique based in counting characters, mainly employed for automatic subtitle segmentation currently. The corpus used to train and test the proposed automated segmentation method is also described and shared with the community, in order to foster further research in this area.

This paper describes the data collection, annotation and sharing activities carried out within the FP7 EU-funded SAVAS project. The project aims to collect, share and reuse audiovisual language resources from broadcasters and subtitling companies to develop large vocabulary continuous speech recognisers in specific domains and new languages, with the purpose of solving the automated subtitling needs of the media industry.

This article describes a large-scale evaluation of the use of Statistical Machine Translation for professional subtitling. The work was carried out within the FP7 EU-funded project SUMAT and involved two rounds of evaluation: a quality evaluation and a measure of productivity gain/loss. We present the SMT systems built for the project and the corpora they were trained on, which combine professionally created and crowd-sourced data. Evaluation goals, methodology and results are presented for the eleven translation pairs that were evaluated by professional subtitlers. Overall, a majority of the machine translated subtitles received good quality ratings. The results were also positive in terms of productivity, with a global gain approaching 40%. We also evaluated the impact of applying quality estimation and filtering of poor MT output, which resulted in higher productivity gains for filtered files as opposed to fully machine-translated files. Finally, we present and discuss feedback from the subtitlers who participated in the evaluation, a key aspect for any eventual adoption of machine translation technology in professional subtitling.

Subtitling and audiovisual translation have been recognized as areas that could greatly benefit from the introduction of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) followed by post-editing, in order to increase efficiency of subtitle production process. The FP7 European project SUMAT (An Online Service for SUbtitling by MAchine Translation: http://www.sumat-project.eu) aims to develop an online subtitle translation service for nine European languages, combined into 14 different language pairs, in order to semi-automate the subtitle translation processes of both freelance translators and subtitling companies on a large scale. In this paper we discuss the data collection and parallel corpus compilation for training SMT systems, which includes several procedures such as data partition, conversion, formatting, normalization and alignment. We discuss in detail each data pre-processing step using various approaches. Apart from the quantity (around 1 million subtitles per language pair), the SUMAT corpus has a number of very important characteristics. First of all, high quality both in terms of translation and in terms of high-precision alignment of parallel documents and their contents has been achieved. Secondly, the contents are provided in one consistent format and encoding. Finally, additional information such as type of content in terms of genres and domain is available.