Abstract
The effective integration of MT technology into computer-assisted translation tools is a challenging topic both for academic research and the translation industry. In particular, professional translators consider the ability of MT systems to adapt to the feedback provided by them to be crucial. In this paper, we propose an adaptation scheme to tune a statistical MT system to a translation project using small amounts of post-edited texts, like those generated by a single user in even just one day of work. The same scheme can be applied on a larger scale in order to focus general purpose models towards the specific domain of interest. We assess our method on two domains, namely information technology and legal, and four translation directions, from English to French, Italian, Spanish and German. The main outcome is that our adaptation strategy can be very effective provided that the seed data used for adaptation is ‘close enough’ to the remaining text to be translated; otherwise, MT quality neither improves nor worsens, thus showing the robustness of our method.
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In computer-assisted translation (CAT), translators work with special text editors, simply called CAT tools, integrating several translation aids, such as translation memories, terminology dictionaries, spell checkers, concordancers, and recently also MT engines.
The exponential function to binary features is applied to neutralize the log function that is applied to all features participating in the log-linear model.
Available from http://www.statmt.org/wmt13/translation-task.html.
2013/488/EU: “Council Decision of 23 September 2013 on the security rules for protecting EU classified information”.
It is a report by the European Parliament, not included in the training data, containing a proposal for financial regulations in the European Union, available at: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+REPORT+A7-2013-0039+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN.
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This work was supported by the MateCAT project, which is funded by the EC under the \(7^{th}\) Framework Programme.
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Cettolo, M., Bertoldi, N., Federico, M. et al. Translation project adaptation for MT-enhanced computer assisted translation. Machine Translation 28, 127–150 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-014-9152-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-014-9152-1