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A Classifier to Determine Whether a Document is Professionally or Machine Translated

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 261))

Abstract

In an increasingly networked world, the availability of high quality translations is critical for success, especially in the context of international competition. International companies need to provide well translated, high quality technical documentation not only to be successful in the market but also to meet legal regulations. We seek to evaluate translation quality, specifically concerning technical documentation, and formulate a method to evaluate the translation quality of technical documents both when we do have access to the original documents and when we do not. We rely on state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms and translation evaluation metrics in the context of a knowledge discovery process. Our evaluation is performed on a sentence level where each sentence is classified as either professionally translated or machine translated. The results for each sentence is then combined to evaluate the full document. The research is based on a database that contains 22,327 sentences and 32 translation evaluation attributes, which are used to optimize Decision Trees that are used to evaluate translation quality. Our method achieves an accuracy of 70.48 % on sentence level for texts in the database and can accurately classify documents with at least 100 sentences.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Documentation for VMware’s vSphere, available at https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.doc%2FGUID-1B959D6B-41CA-4E23-A7DB-E9165D5A0E80.html (last accessed: January 19, 2016).

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for Andreas Kerren’s and Ola Peterson’s valuable feedback on the Master’s thesis project [8] that this research is based on.

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Correspondence to Anna Wingkvist .

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Luckert, M., Schaefer-Kehnert, M., Löwe, W., Ericsson, M., Wingkvist, A. (2016). A Classifier to Determine Whether a Document is Professionally or Machine Translated. In: Řepa, V., Bruckner, T. (eds) Perspectives in Business Informatics Research. BIR 2016. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 261. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45321-7_24

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