Abstract
The Swiss avalanche bulletin is produced twice a day in four languages. Due to the lack of time available for manual translation, a fully automated translation system is employed, based on a catalogue of predefined phrases and predetermined rules of how these phrases can be combined to produce sentences. The system is able to automatically translate such sentences from German into the target languages French, Italian and English without subsequent proofreading or correction. Our catalogue of phrases is limited to a small sublanguage. The reduction of daily translation costs is expected to offset the initial development costs within a few years. After being operational for two winter seasons, we assess here the quality of the produced texts based on an evaluation where participants rate real danger descriptions from both origins, the catalogue of phrases versus the manually written and translated texts. With a mean recognition rate of 55%, users can hardly distinguish between the two types of texts, and give similar ratings with respect to their language quality. Overall, the output from the catalogue system can be considered virtually equivalent to a text written by avalanche forecasters and then manually translated by professional translators. Furthermore, forecasters declared that all relevant situations were captured by the system with sufficient accuracy and within the limited time available.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Aikawa, T., Schwartz, L., King, R., Corston-Oliver, M., Lozano, C.: Impact of controlled language on translation quality and post-editing in a statistical machine translation environment. In: Proceedings of the MT Summit XI, pp. 1–7. European Association for Machine Translation (2007)
Bouayad-Agha, N., Power, R., Belz, A.: PILLS: Multilingual generation of medical information documents with overlapping content. In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 2111–2114 (2002)
España-Bonet, C., Enache, R., Slaski, A., Ranta, A., Màrquez, L., Gonzàlez, M.: Patent translation within the MOLTO project. In: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Patent Translation, MT Summit (2011), http://www.molto-project.eu/sites/default/files/patentsMOLTO4.pdf
Hallett, C., Scott, D., Power, R.: Composing questions through conceptual authoring. Computational Linguistics 33(1), 105–133 (2007)
Hayes, P., Maxwell, S., Schmandt, L.: Controlled English advantages for translated and original English documents. In: Proceedings of CLAW 1996, pp. 84–92 (1996)
Kaljurand, K., Kuhn, T.: A Multilingual Semantic Wiki Based on Attempto Controlled English and Grammatical Framework. In: Cimiano, P., Corcho, O., Presutti, V., Hollink, L., Rudolph, S. (eds.) ESWC 2013. LNCS, vol. 7882, pp. 427–441. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Kuhn, T.: A Survey and Classification of Controlled Natural Languages. Computational Linguistics 40(1) (2014)
Lepsus, T., Langlais, P., Lapalme, G.: A corpus-based Approach to Weather Report Translation. Technical Report, University of Montréal, Canada (2004)
Mitamura, T., Nyberg, E.H.: Controlled English for knowledge-based MT: Experience with the KANT system. In: Proceedings of TMI 1995, pp. 158–172 (1995)
O’Brien, S., Roturier, J.: How portable are controlled language rules? A comparison of two empirical MT studies. In: Proceedings of MT Summit XI, pp. 345–352. European Association for Machine Translation (2007)
Pym, P.J.: Pre-editing and the use of simplified writing for MT: an engineer’s experience of operating an MT system. In: Translating and the Computer 10: The Translation Environment 10 Years on, number 10, pp. 80–96. Aslib (1990)
Ranta, A.: Grammatical Framework: Programming with Multilingual Grammars. CSLI Publications, Stanford (2011)
Ruesch, M., Egloff, A., Gerber, M., Weiss, G., Winkler, K.: The software behind the interactive display of the Swiss avalanche bulletin. In: Proceedings ISSW 2013. International Snow Science Workshop, Grenoble, France, pp. 406–412. ANENA, IRSTEA, Météo-France (2013)
Ruffino, J.R.: Coping with machine translation. In: Lawson, V. (ed.) Practical Experience of Machine Translation, pp. 57–60. North-Holland Publishing Company (1982)
Schug, J.: Personal communication, Meteomedia, Gais, Switzerland (May 14, 2010)
Temnikova, I.: Text Complexity and Text Simplification in the Crisis Management Domain. Ph.D. thesis, University of Wolverhampton (2012)
Winkler, K., Bächtold, M., Gallorini, S., Niederer, U., Stucki, T., Pielmeier, C., Darms, G., Dürr, L., Techel, F., Zweifel, B.: Swiss avalanche bulletin: automated translation with a catalogue of phrases. In: Proceedings ISSW 2013. International Snow Science Workshop, Grenoble, France, pp. 437–441. ANENA, IRSTEA, Météo-France (2013)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Winkler, K., Kuhn, T., Volk, M. (2014). Evaluating the Fully Automatic Multi-language Translation of the Swiss Avalanche Bulletin. In: Davis, B., Kaljurand, K., Kuhn, T. (eds) Controlled Natural Language. CNL 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8625. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10223-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10223-8_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10222-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10223-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)