Translation as a Collaborative Activity

Benjamin B. Bederson & Philip Resnik

Computer Science DepartmentHuman-Computer Interaction Lab

Department of LinguisticsComputational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab

University of Maryland

Source: Global Reach, Internet World Stats

Languages on Internet by Population

English28%

Chinese23%

Spanish8%

Japanese5%

the rest37%

2009

English32%

Chinese21%

Spanish8%

Japanese8%

the rest31%

2005

English52%

Chinese5%

Spanish5%

Japanese9%

the rest29%

2000

International Children’s Digital Library

www.childrenslibrary.org

A real-world problem: ICDL

Now– 4,386 books– 54 languages– Some translations in a few

languages– 49,420 adults, 29,102 children

registered– ~100K unique visitors/month

Goal– 10,000 books– 100 languages– Every book in every

language!

Machine Translation (MT)

Large volume, cheap, fast Unreliable quality

(餐厅 = restaurant, dining hall)

Professional Translators

High quality, but slow and expensive(even for common language pairs)

Amateur Translators

The key idea

Translation with the Crowd

vs. 75,000 contributors Wikipedia: 800 translators

Translate with the Monolingual Crowd

Quality

Affor

dabi

lity

MachineTranslationMachineTranslation

Professional Bilingual Human ParticipationProfessional Bilingual Human Participation

Amateur Bilingual Human ParticipationAmateur Bilingual Human Participation

MonolingualHumanParticipation

Monolingual translation protocol

F0

Original source sentence E0

MTNoisy target hypothesis

E1Fluent target hypothesisMTF1

Noisy back translation

F2Fluent, accurate E2

MT Et cetera…

Monolingual post-editing

HTER editing

Enrich Translations

Increase redundancy and shared context …

… to help make detectable errors correctable… to help make undetectable errors detectable

PierreSays: En général, on s'entend bien, tous les deux. (lit. In general, we get along together, the two of us.)

Mary

Sees: In general, it means well, both.MT

PierreSays: En général, on s'entend bien, tous les deux. (lit. In general, we get along together, the two of us.)

Sees: En général, Il est à la fois de nous.

Mary

Sees: In general, it means well, both.

Edits into: In general, it is about both of us.

MT

MT

PierreSays: En général, on s'entend bien, tous les deux. (lit. In general, we get along together, the two of us.)

Sees: En général, Il est à la fois de nous.

Edits into: En général, nous nous entendons bien.

(lit. In general, we get along well.)

Mary

Sees: In general, it means well, both.

Edits into: In general, it is about both of us.

Sees: In general, we get along fine.

MT

MT

MT

enrichment

PierreSays: En général, on s'entend bien, tous les deux. (lit. In general, we get along together, the two of us.)

Sees: En général, Il est à la fois de nous.

Edits into: En général, nous nous entendons bien.

(lit. In general, we get along well.)

Sees: En général, nous sommes de bons amis.(lit. In general, we are good friends.)

Mary

Sees: In general, it means well, both.

Edits into: In general, it is about both of us.

Sees: In general, we get along fine.

Edits into: In general, we are good friends.

MT

MT

MT

MT

enrichment

PierreSays: En général, on s'entend bien, tous les deux. (lit. In general, we get along together, the two of us.)

Sees: En général, Il est à la fois de nous.

Edits into: En général, nous nous entendons bien.

(lit. In general, we get along well.)

Sees: En général, nous sommes de bons amis.(lit. In general, we are good friends.)

Proposes to stop with current translation

Mary

Sees: In general, it means well, both.

Edits into: In general, it is about both of us.

Sees: In general, we get along fine.

Edits into: In general, we are good friends.

Agrees to stop with current translation

MT

MT

MT

MT

enrichment

Web link

Image

Mark ok

Mark problematic

Preliminary validation of the protocol

• Language pair: Russian to Chinese– Hard case: no orthographic cues– Easy to find local volunteers

• Two Russian speakers and four Chinese speakers– Four Russian-Chinese translation pairs (Russians twice)– One hour per pair

• Worked on 44 sentences (6 pages), finished 28– = ~8.5 minutes per sentence (~1 word per minute) – N.B. average translators: ~2500 words per 8hr day

(= ~5 words per minute)

Google Translate …

none little much most all0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

6 6

9

43

Google TranslateMonotrans

Original meaning translated

# of

sen

tenc

es

… Monotrans

None Little Much Most All0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

6 6

9

43

0

45

12

7

Google TranslateMonotrans

Original meaning translated

# of

sen

tenc

es

Ishida, Lin and colleagues at Kyoto University Department of Social Informatics have independently developed a very similar back-and-forth protocol.

In their protocol, there is no enrichment to increase redundancy: if the target participant cannot make sense of the whole sentence, he or she requests that the entire original sentence be rephrased.

Global Internet User Population

Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

لتحرير الشعبية الحركة اعلنتفي مرشحها سحب السودانفي اجراؤها المقرر الرئاسية االنتخاباتتاكيدات/ حسب الجاري، ابريل نيسان

الحركة في .لقياديين

Announced a Popular Movement for the Liberation of Sudan to withdraw its candidate in the presidential elections scheduled in April this as confirmation of the leaders in the movement.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8597996.stm

Announced SPLM withdraw its candidate in the presidential elections in April by assurances to leaders in the movement.

Do I really need to worry about this?

With some things, it’s very hard to say no.

Monolingual post-editing

Callison-Burch (2005)

Enriching context

• Ppl r rlly gd t gttng mst f th mnng rght, vn frm dfcnt txt.

{minus,weak,deficient}

One more observation

The original source sentence is not the only way the intended meaning could have been expressed.

Perhaps one of these alternatives can be more successful

Suppose this phrasing is difficult to translate correctly

a restaurant close by

Polls indicate Brown, a state senator, and Coakley, Massachusetts’ Attorney General, are locked in a virtual tie to fill the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat

Les sondages indiquent Brown, un s ´enateur d’ ´ etat, et Coakley, Massachusetts’ Procureur g´en´eral, sont enferm´ es dans une cravate virtuel `a remplir le regrett´e s ´enateur Ted Kennedy’s si`ege au S´enat.

Les sondages indiquent Brown, un s´enateur d’ ´ etat, et Coakley, Massachusetts’ Procureur g´en´eral, sont enferm´es dans une cravate virtuel `a remplir le regrett´e s´enateur Ted Kennedy’s si`ege au S´enat.

Polls indicate Brown, a state senator, and Coakley, Massachusetts’ Attorney General, are locked in a virtual tie to fill the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat

Polls indicate that Brown, a state senator, and Coakley, the Attorney General of Massachusetts, are locked in a virtual tie to fill the Senate seat of the Sen. Ted Kennedy, who died recently.

Les sondages indiquent que Brown, un s ´ enateur d’ ´ etat, et Coakley, le procureur g ´en´eral du Massachusetts, sont enferm´ es dans une cravate virtuel pourvoir le sige au S´enat de Sen. Ted Kennedy, qui est d´ ec´ed´e r´ecemment

Automatically determining where the errors are

F

MT

E

MT

F’

the most recent probe to visit jupiter was the pluto-bound new horizons spacecraft

NP PP

NP

The most recent

probe

to

Mismatches?

D S

visit Jupiter

was the Pluto-bound new horizons spacecraft

The latest research

visit Jupiter

was the Pluto-bound new horizons spacecraft

• the press trust of india quoted • the government minister for relief and rehabilitation kadam

– kadam, the government’s relief and rehabilitation minister (2/3)– the government minister concerned with relief and rehabiliation kadam (1/3)

• as revealing today that in the last week, the monsoon has started in • all of india’s states one

– every one of india’s state, one (3/3)– each of India’s states one (2/3)– all states of india one (1/3)

• after another, and that the financial losses and casualties have been serious in all areas. just in maharashtra, the state which includes

• mumbai, india’s largest city, – india's largest city, mumbai (3/3)– the largest city in India, Mumbai, (3/3)– mumbai, the largest city of india, (3/3)

• the number of people • known to have died

– who died (3/3) – identified to have died (2/3) – known to have passed away (2/3)

• has now reached 358.

For 31% of the sentences in an English-to-Chinese experiment, at least one new version of the sentence leads to better translation.

Often the gains are quite substantial.

Polls indicate Brown, a state senator, and Coakley, Massachusetts’ Attorney General, are locked in a virtual tie to fill the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat

Les sondages indiquent Brown, un s ´enateur d’ ´ etat, et Coakley, Massachusetts’ Procureur g´en´eral, sont enferm´ es dans une cravate virtuel `a remplir le regrett´e s ´enateur Ted Kennedy’s si`ege au S´enat.

Les sondages indiquent Brown, un s´enateur d’ ´ etat, et Coakley, Massachusetts’ Procureur g´en´eral, sont enferm´es dans une cravate virtuel `a remplir le regrett´e s´enateur Ted Kennedy’s si`ege au S´enat.

Polls indicate Brown, a state senator, and Coakley, Massachusetts’ Attorney General, are locked in a virtual tie to fill the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat

Polls indicate that Brown, a state senator, and Coakley, the Attorney General of Massachusetts, are locked in a virtual tie to fill the Senate seat of the Sen. Ted Kennedy, who died recently.

Les sondages indiquent que Brown, un s ´ enateur d’ ´ etat, et Coakley, le procureur g ´en´eral du Massachusetts, sont enferm´ es dans une cravate virtuel pourvoir le sige au S´enat de Sen. Ted Kennedy, qui est d´ ec´ed´e r´ecemment

Where to from here?

• Larger and more formal validation of the protocol• Exploring the space of richer annotations• Reconsidering UI for:

– Ease of use– Throughput– Parallel, multi-person contribution

• Exploring the space of automatic and human error detection and paraphrase

Collaborators and Sponsors

Chang HuCS Ph.D. student

Olivia BuzekCS/Linguistics undergrad

Alex QuinnCS Ph.D. student

Yakov KronrodLinguistics Ph.D. student