Sensible: L2 Translation Assistance by Emulating the Manual Post-Editing Process

Abstract

This paper describes the Post-Editor Z system submitted to the L2 writing assistant task in SemEval-2014. The aim of task is to build a translation assistance system to translate untranslated sentence fragments. This is not unlike the task of post-editing where human translators improve machine-generated translations. Post-Editor Z emulates the manual process of post-editing by (i) crawling and extracting parallel sentences that contain the untranslated fragments from a Web-based translation memory, (ii) extracting the possible translations of the fragments indexed by the translation memory and (iii) applying simple cosine-based sentence similarity to rank possible translations for the untranslated fragment.