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EXTRA: a system for example-based translation assistance

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Machine Translation

Abstract

In this paper we present EXTRA (EXample-based TRanslation Assistant), a translation memory (TM) system. EXTRA is able to propose effective translation suggestions by relying on syntactic analysis of the text and on a rigorous, language-independent measure; the search is performed efficiently in large amounts of bilingual texts thanks to its advanced retrieval techniques. EXTRA does not use external knowledge requiring the intervention of users and is completely customizable and portable as it has been implemented on top of a standard DataBase Management System. The paper provides a thorough evaluation of both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our system. In particular, in order to quantify the benefits offered by EXTRA assisted translation over manual translation, we introduce a simulator implementing specifically devised statistical, process-oriented, discrete-event models. As far as we know, this is the first time statistical simulation experiments have been used to face the nontrivial problem of evaluating TM systems, particularly for comparing the time that could be saved by performing assisted translation versus “manual” translation and for optimally tuning the system behaviour with respect to differently skilled users. In our experiments, we considered three scenarios, manual translation with one or two translators and assisted translation with one translator. The time needed for one translator to do an assisted translation is significantly closer to that of a team of two translators than to that of the single translator. The mean sentence translation time is by far the lowest for this scenario, corresponding to the highest per translator productivity. We also estimate the total translation time when the number of query sentences, the maximum number of suggestions to be read, and the probability of look up are varied: the best trade-off is given by reading (and presenting) four or five suggestions at the most.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dip. di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

    Federica Mandreoli, Riccardo Martoglia & Paolo Tiberio

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  1. Federica Mandreoli
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  2. Riccardo Martoglia
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  3. Paolo Tiberio
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Correspondence to Riccardo Martoglia.

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Mandreoli, F., Martoglia, R. & Tiberio, P. EXTRA: a system for example-based translation assistance. Machine Translation 20, 167–197 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-007-9023-0

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