Touch-based pre-post-editing of machine translation output

Abstract

We introduce pre-post-editing, possibly the most basic form of interactive translation, as a touch-based interaction with iteratively improved translation hypotheses prior to classical post-editing. We report simulated experiments that yield very large improvements on classical evaluation metrics (up to 21 BLEU) as well as on a parameterized variant of the TER metric that takes into account the cost of matching/touching tokens, confirming the promising prospects of the novel translation scenarios offered by our approach.