Using bilingual segments to improve interactive machine translation

Abstract

Recent research on machine translation has achieved substantial progress. However, the machine translation results are still not error-free, and need to be post-edited by a human translator (user) to produce correct translations. Interactive machine translation enhanced the human-computer collaboration through having human validate the longest correct prefix in the suggested translation. In this paper, we refine the interactivity protocol to provide more natural collaboration. Users are allowed to validate bilingual segments, which give more direct guidance to the decoder and more hints to the users. Besides, validating bilingual segments is easier than identifying correct segments from the incorrect translations. Experimental results with real users show that the new protocol improved the translation efficiency and translation quality on three Chinese-English translation tasks.