Machine Translation: From Real Users to Research: 6th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA 2004, Washington, DC, USA, September 28 – October 2, 2004. Proceedings

Jeffrey Allen (auth.), Robert E. Frederking, Kathryn B. Taylor (eds.)3540233008, 9783540233008, 9783540301943

The previous conference in this series (AMTA 2002) took up the theme “From Research to Real Users”, and sought to explore why recent research on data-driven machine translation didn’t seem to be moving to the marketplace. As it turned out, the ?rst commercial products of the data-driven research movement were just over the horizon, andintheinterveningtwoyearstheyhavebeguntoappearinthemarketplace. Atthesame time,rule-basedmachinetranslationsystemsareintroducingdata-driventechniquesinto the mix in their products. Machine translation as a software application has a 50-year history. There are an increasing number of exciting deployments of MT, many of which will be exhibited and discussed at the conference. But the scale of commercial use has never approached the estimates of the latent demand. In light of this, we reversed the question from AMTA 2002, to look at the next step in the path to commercial success for MT. We took user needs as our theme, and explored how or whether market requirements are feeding into research programs. The transition of research discoveries to practical use involves te- nicalquestionsthatarenotassexyasthosethathavedriventheresearchcommunityand research funding. Important product issues such as system customizability, computing resource requirements, and usability and ?tness for particular tasks need to engage the creativeenergiesofallpartsofourcommunity,especiallyresearch,aswemovemachine translation from a niche application to a more pervasive language conversion process. Thesetopicswereaddressedattheconferencethroughthepaperscontainedinthesep- ceedings, and even more speci?cally through several invited presentations and panels.

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Table of contents :
Front Matter….Pages –
Case Study: Implementing MT for the Translation of Pre-sales Marketing and Post-sales Software Deployment Documentation at Mycom International….Pages 1-6
A Speech-to-Speech Translation System for Catalan, Spanish, and English….Pages 7-16
Multi-align: Combining Linguistic and Statistical Techniques to Improve Alignments for Adaptable MT….Pages 17-26
A Modified Burrows-Wheeler Transform for Highly Scalable Example-Based Translation….Pages 27-36
Designing a Controlled Language for the Machine Translation of Medical Protocols: The Case of English to Chinese….Pages 37-47
Normalizing German and English Inflectional Morphology to Improve Statistical Word Alignment….Pages 48-57
System Description: A Highly Interactive Speech-to-Speech Translation System….Pages 58-63
A Fluency Error Categorization Scheme to Guide Automated Machine Translation Evaluation….Pages 64-73
Online MT Services and Real Users’ Needs: An Empirical Usability Evaluation….Pages 74-85
Counting, Measuring, Ordering: Translation Problems and Solutions….Pages 86-93
Feedback from the Field: The Challenge of Users in Motion….Pages 94-101
The Georgetown-IBM Experiment Demonstrated in January 1954….Pages 102-114
Pharaoh: A Beam Search Decoder for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation Models….Pages 115-124
The PARS Family of Machine Translation Systems for Dutch System Description/Demonstration….Pages 125-129
Rapid MT Experience in an LCTL (Pashto)….Pages 130-133
The Significance of Recall in Automatic Metrics for MT Evaluation….Pages 134-143
Alignment of Bilingual Named Entities in Parallel Corpora Using Statistical Model….Pages 144-153
Weather Report Translation Using a Translation Memory….Pages 154-163
Keyword Translation from English to Chinese for Multilingual QA….Pages 164-176
Extraction of Name and Transliteration in Monolingual and Parallel Corpora….Pages 177-186
Error Analysis of Two Types of Grammar for the Purpose of Automatic Rule Refinement….Pages 187-196
The Contribution of End-Users to the TransType2 Project….Pages 197-207
An Experiment on Japanese-Uighur Machine Translation and Its Evaluation….Pages 208-216
A Structurally Diverse Minimal Corpus for Eliciting Structural Mappings Between Languages….Pages 217-226
Investigation of Intelligibility Judgments….Pages 227-235
Interlingual Annotation for MT Development….Pages 236-245
Machine Translation of Online Product Support Articles Using a Data-Driven MT System….Pages 246-251
Maintenance Issues for Machine Translation Systems….Pages 252-261
Improving Domain-Specific Word Alignment with a General Bilingual Corpus….Pages 262-271
A Super-Function Based Japanese-Chinese Machine Translation System for Business Users….Pages 272-281
Back Matter….Pages –