Simultaneous interpretation, the translation of speech from one language to another in real-time, is an inherently difficult and strenuous task. One of the greatest challenges faced by interpreters is the accurate translation of difficult terminology like proper names, numbers, or other entities. Intelligent computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) tools that could analyze the spoken word and detect terms likely to be untranslated by an interpreter could reduce translation error and improve interpreter performance. In this paper, we propose a task of predicting which terminology simultaneous interpreters will leave untranslated, and examine methods that perform this task using supervised sequence taggers. We describe a number of task-specific features explicitly designed to indicate when an interpreter may struggle with translating a word. Experimental results on a newly-annotated version of the NAIST Simultaneous Translation Corpus (Shimizu et al., 2014) indicate the promise of our proposed method.

Simultaneous interpretation, translation of the spoken word in real-time, is both highly challenging and physically demanding. Methods to predict interpreter confidence and the adequacy of the interpreted message have a number of potential applications, such as in computer-assisted interpretation interfaces or pedagogical tools. We propose the task of predicting simultaneous interpreter performance by building on existing methodology for quality estimation (QE) of machine translation output. In experiments over five settings in three language pairs, we extend a QE pipeline to estimate interpreter performance (as approximated by the METEOR evaluation metric) and propose novel features reflecting interpretation strategy and evaluation measures that further improve prediction accuracy.