Volk
Fakultäten » Philosophische Fakultät » Computerlinguistik, Institut für » Prof. Dr. Michael Hess » Volk
Completed research project
| Title / Titel | Evaluation of Machine Translation Systems | ||||||
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| Abstract (PDF, 14 KB) | |||||||
| Summary / Zusammenfassung | Machine Translation systems are now commercially available for a variety of language pairs and in a price range that makes them accessible to small companies and even to free lance translators (i.e. in the price range below CHF 2000). However these systems cannot be used ``out of the box'' in order to translate any type of document. Moreover, evaluating a Machine Translation system turns out to be considerably more difficult than evaluating a standard business system. For this reason we have developed a methodology for the systematic evaluation of this type of software. Our aim was to find out whether MT systems in the low price range could be used in a real life situation, that is whether such an Machine Translation system would increase a translator's productivity. Three experiments are performed to judge the following aspects of an MT system: 1. Information content of the translations. People were asked to answer questions about the text on the basis of the translations only. 2. User-friendliness. People were asked to acquaint themselves with a system, translate a given text, add items to the system lexicon and post-edit the results. Afterwards they were interviewed to judge the system performance. 3. Translation quality. People were asked to rank the translations from different systems all produced from the same source text. We evaluated 6 systems so far and presented our findings at various industry seminars. An (industry sponsored) evaluation of two systems on a much larger scale is now under way. Weitere Informationen |
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| Publications / Publikationen | Martin Volk: The Automatic Translation of Idioms. Machine Translation vs. Translation Memory Systems. In: Nico Weber (ed.): Machine Translation: Theory, Applications, and Evaluation. An assessment of the state of the art. St. Augustin: gardez-Verlag. 1998. Deutsche Zusammenfassung (HTML) Full version (compressed postscript) Martin Volk: Das Evaluieren von Software für die maschinenunterstützte Übersetzung. In: équivalences 97. Die Akten. Computerwerkzeuge am Übersetzer-Arbeitsplatz: Theorie und Praxis. Bern: ASTTI. Schweizerischer Übersetzer-, Terminologen- und Dolmetscher-Verband. 1998. 105-117. |
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| Keywords / Suchbegriffe | Machine Translation, evaluation methodology | ||||||
| Project leadership and contacts / Projektleitung und Kontakte |
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| Funding source(s) / Unterstützt durch |
Universität Zürich (position pursuing an academic career), Private Sector (e.g. Industry) |
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| Duration of Project / Projektdauer | Jan 1996 to Sep 1999 |